Fiber-Enabled Optical Wireless Communications With Full Beam Coverage

Abstract

This work proposes a fiber-enabled optical wireless communication (FE-OWC) system for bidirectional communications between the base station (BS) and a number of mobile user terminals (UTs) via full beam coverage, aimed at facilitating ultra-high data rate communications. The FE-OWC system comprises optical antennas, optical chains, and baseband units at both BS and UTs. The innovative optical antenna consists of an array of fiber ports and a transceiver lens, which can form a number of transmit and receive optical beams and provide a full beam coverage for simultaneous downlink and uplink connections with a number of UTs, respectively. We present analysis to characterize downlink and uplink channel models and gains, including both optical and electrical parts, between the BS and UTs and conduct a complete link budget analysis. We further design downlink and uplink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) as well as massive MIMO transmission protocols and develop asymptotically optimal schemes for a large number of fiber ports. Numerical results illustrate that the FE-OWC system has the potential to support over 10 Gbps data rate per UT and Tbps system throughput required in future 6G mobile communication systems.