Highly efficient optical beam steering using an in-fiber diffraction grating for full duplex indoor optical wireless communication

Wang, Guoqing and Habib, Usman and Yan, Zhijun and Gomes, Nathan J. and Sui, Qingmei and Wang, Jun-Bo and Zhang, Lin and Wang, Chao (2018) Highly efficient optical beam steering using an in-fiber diffraction grating for full duplex indoor optical wireless communication. Journal of Lightwave Technology, 36 (19). pp. 4618-4625. ISSN 0733-8724. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1109/JLT.2018.2832200) (Access to this publication is currently restricted. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)

Abstract

Diffraction gratings have been widely used in wavelength-controlled non-mechanical laser beam steering for high data-rate indoor optical wireless communications (OWC). Existing free-space diffraction gratings suffer from inherent difficulties of limited diffraction efficiency, bulky configuration, high cost and significant coupling loss with optical fiber links. In this work, a new optical approach for highly efficient, compact and fiber compatible laser beam steering using an in-fiber diffraction grating is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for the first time to our best knowledge. In-fiber diffraction is made possible based on a 45° tilted fiber grating (TFG), where wavelength dependent lateral scattering is obtained due to the strongly tilted grating structure. Improved diffraction efficiency of 93.5% has been achieved. In addition, the 45° TFG works perfectly for both light emission and reception, enabling full-duplex optical wireless transmission. Utility of the 45° TFG in all-fiber laser beam steering for multi-user full duplex optical wireless communications has been verified in experiments. 1.4 m free-space full-duplex wireless transmission has been demonstrated with data rate up to 12 Gb/s per beam using 2.4 GHz bandwidth OFDM signals.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled keywords:	Beam steering, microwave photonics, optical diffraction, optical wireless communication, tilted fiber gratings
Subjects:	T Technology > TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering > TK5101 Telecommunications > TK5103.59 Optical communications, Fibre-optics
Divisions:	Faculties > Sciences > School of Engineering and Digital Arts > Broadband & Wireless Communications
Depositing User:	Chao Wang
Date Deposited:	07 Apr 2018 21:19 UTC
Last Modified:	04 Sep 2018 14:13 UTC
Resource URI:	https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/66657 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)
Wang, Chao:	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0454-8079