Tunable Receiver Design for Spatially Distributed Wireless Optical Sensors in IoT Networks

Research and development of novel wireless access technologies for Internet-of-things (IoT) has lately garnered a lot of interest. Against this background, we design a wavelength-sensitive tunable wireless receiver architecture that enables remotely-seeded tuning of spatially distributed optical wireless sensor units in an IoT network. The tuning is achieved by optical frequency beating of a remotely-located laser's signal with the received wavelength-multiplexed signal from optical sources like lasers or light emitting diodes (LEDs). This eliminates the need for separate frequency filters and provides distributed frequency-space diversity, thereby increasing the number of sensor units. The proposed receiver can be employed in systems which require a plurality of sensor units like industrial IoT networks. We simulate the hardware model of the proposed architecture to analyze its error performance and also present a reliability analysis to determine the probability of system failure which is evaluated in terms of parameters like system reliability, system availability, mean time between failures and outage time of the system. We show that the proposed receiver works at high data rates with low bit error rate (BER) and also has good reliability performance.