Optical Mobile Communications: Architecture and Enabling Technologies

Abstract

<p>Modern mobile communication systems exploit complicated modulations to increase spectrum efficiency and larger antenna arrays to suppress co-channel interferences. However, these techniques have also caused surges of power consumption and hardware cost, making it unsustainable to squeeze gains from the radio-frequency electronics. To circumvent the dilemma, optical mobile communication (OMC) systems exploit wideband lasers to carry data, and do not necessarily involve high-order modulation and oversized arrays. In OMC systems, parallel laser beams can achieve data rate of Tbps, connection density of thousands of links/m$^2$, and energy efficiency of Gbits/J, with low cost and low signal processing complexity, as long as the challenges in receiver tracking, channel decorrelation and anti-blocking can be tackled. To this end, this work presents a new OMC system architecture and discusses enabling technologies of practical OMC systems. A prototype is built to verify the feasibility of several key concepts. It is shown that a practical OMC system requires collaboration of fast and accurate positioning systems, rapid laser steerers, optical reflective intelligent surfaces and decorrelation optics.</p>