Novel Wireless Laser Networking Strategy by Receiver Multiplexing With Virtual and Actual Topology Transition

Wireless laser communication exploits optical path to transmit and receive data. It is one of the most promising paradigms for wireless communication, with extremely high transmission rate and channel bandwidth. However, there exist remarkable challenges in constructing a wireless laser network due to the nature of point-to-point communication. In order to address this drawback, we develop a practical laser node model and network model based on the receiver antenna multiplexing, where the receiver is shared by more than one transmitter antennas at a node. Taking the antennas at a node as the constraints, we first propose the mechanism of transmitter antennas pointing independent of the receiver antenna status. Then, we introduce the concepts of virtual and actual link as well as virtual and actual topology transition. During network establishment, we formulate the slot allocation into an optimization problem to minimize the time slots for setting up multiple transmission paths in the case of simultaneous transmissions and, thus, reduce the frequency of link establishment and scheduling time. The simulation results verify the availability of scanning with multiple transmitter antennas while sharing one receiver antenna, the fast networking process and the efficiency of the proposed antenna scheduling scheme.