Line strip multibeam transmitter to combat the multipath dispersion and background noise of the indoor optical wireless links

Abstract

The paper presents and evaluates a novel optical wireless configuration that employs multibeam transmitters in conjunction with direction diversity receivers. Such a configuration overcomes the drawbacks and combines the advantages of both types of optical wireless links including line-of-sight and diffuse links. We present an investigation of the effect of this configuration on the optical channel over the entire communication floor considering two important channel parameters, received power and delay spread. A multibeam transmitter placed on the communication floor was adopted to produce multiple diffuse spots in the middle of the ceiling in the form of a line strip. The results show that a high-received signal power, when the system operates under the constraints of background noise and multipath dispersion, can he obtained by using the proposed line strip multibeam transmitter (LSMT). Furthermore, with only three branch diversity, the proposed system gives about 23 dB SNR improvement over the conventional diffuse system.