Wireless Optical based Backhaul Communication for 5G Cellular Systems

Fourth generation wireless cellular systems are currently being deployed uses radio frequencies (RF) of 2.1-2.6GHz electromagnetic spectrum, which is the maximum RF frequency range among all other cellular generations. However, its performance is limited by 1Gbps/100Mbps data rates for pedestrian/mobile users. As the number of mobile users and IoT devices are increasing day by day all over the world, the 5
^th
generation cellular system should be able to support 1000 times more capacity and 25 times higher cell throughput than the existing systems. In 5G, proposed millimeter wave communications (MMW) communications have several disadvantages such as higher attenuation which limits the coverage area. In this paper, the possibility of using optical spectrum (10
^12-
10
¹⁴
Hz) is explored in place of RF spectrum for increasing the capacity of the base station to base station backhaul cellular communication.