Abstract
Free-Space Optical (FSO) systems offer the ability to distribute high speed digital links into remote and rural communities where terrain, installation cost or infrastructure security pose critical hurdles to deployment. A challenge in any point-to-point FSO system is initiating and maintaining optical alignment from the sender to the receiver. In this paper we propose and demonstrate a low-complexity self-aligning FSO prototype that can completely self-align with no requirement for initial manual positioning and could therefore form the opto-mechanical basis for a mesh network of optical transceivers. The prototype utilises off-the-shelf consumer electrical components and a bespoke alignment algorithm. We demonstrate an eight fibre spatially multiplexed link with a loss of 15 dB over 210 m.
Highlights
Free-Space Optical (FSO) systems offer the ability to distribute high speed digital links into remote and rural communities where terrain, installation cost or infrastructure security pose critical hurdles to deployment
Free-Space Optical (FSO) systems can play a central role in providing high-speed network provision to rural communities and replace fibre network breakages arising from environmental disasters[1]
The system utilises a telescope mount, which is controlled by a Raspberry Pi 3 (RPi) compact computer, while the communication system makes use of a passively integrated 1 Gbps small form factor pluggable (SFP) transceiver operating at wavelength of 1550 nm
Summary
In this paper a low-cost FSO system transceiver that can “out-of-the-box”, locate and self align to any neighbouring transceiver within 1 km is presented. The system utilises a global positioning system (GPS) receiver to identify the location of the transceiver. Once determined, this is communicated to nearby transceivers through a low-speed radio link operating at 446 Mhz. The low-speed radio link supports the communication of the automated alignment instructions between the remote transceivers. A bespoke algorithm has been developed for the transceiver capable of self aligning the system at 200 m in an urban environment with average single mode to few mode coupling losses below 16 dB, adequate for 1 Gbps error free-transmission with widely deployed commercial transceivers. The system can be used in low-turbulence environments to support plane-wave division multiplexing[12], where in a data centre environment a 4-channel system with error-free transmission at 1 Gbps per channel is demonstrated
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