Performance evaluation of 2.5 Gbit/s and 5 Gbit/s optical wireless systems employing a two dimensional adaptive beam clustering method and imaging diversity detection

Abstract

Previous indoor mobile optical wireless systems operated typically at 30 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s and here we report on systems that operate at 2.5 Gbit/s and 5 Gbit/s. We are able to achieve these improvements through the introduction of three new approaches: transmit beam power adaptation, a two dimensional beam clustering method (2DBCM), and diversity imaging. Through channel and noise modeling we evaluated the performance of our systems. The performance of a novel optical wireless (OW) configuration that employs a two dimensional adaptive beam clustering method (2DABCM) in conjunction with imaging diversity receivers is evaluated under multipath dispersion and background noise (BN) impairments. The new proposed system (2DABCM transmitter with imaging diversity receiver) can help reduce the effect of intersymbol interference and improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) even at high bit rate. At a bit rate of 30 Mbit/s, previous work has shown that imaging conventional diffuse systems (CDS) with maximal ratio combining (MRC) offer 22 dB better SNR than the non-imaging CDS. Our results indicate that the 2DABCM system with an imaging diversity receiver provides an SNR improvement of 45 dB over the imaging CDS with MRC when both operate at 30 Mbit/s. In the CDS system, an increase in bandwidth from 38 MHz (non-imaging CDS) to 200 MHz approximately, is achieved when an imaging receiver is implemented. Furthermore, the three new methods introduced increase the bandwidth from 38 MHz to 5.56 GHz. At the least successful receiver locations, our 2.5 Gbit/s and 5 Gbit/s imaging 2DABCM systems with MRC offer significant SNR improvements, almost 26 dB and 19 dB respectively over the non-imaging CDS that operates at 30 Mbit/s.