Dynamic indoor free-space optical communication enabled by beam steering and beam shaping

Indoor free-space optical communication (FSO) provides orders of magnitude larger usable bandwidth compared to radio-frequency links but suffers from an intrinsic trade-off between areal coverage and received power. In this paper, we report a dynamic indoor FSO system enabled by a line-of-sight optical link featuring advanced beam con-trol capabilities. The optical link herein utilizes a passive target acquisition scheme by combining a beam steering and beam shaping transmitter with a receiver adorned with a ring-shaped retroreflector. When controlled by an efficient beam scanning algorithm, the transmitter is capable of locating the receiver with millimeter-scale accuracy over a distance of 3 m with a full viewing angle of +/- 11.25 degrees in the vertical direction and +/- 18.75 degrees in the horizontal direction within 1.162 +/- 0.005 s, regardless of the receiver's positions. We also demonstrate 1 Gbit/s data rate with bit error rates below 4 x 10-7 using an 850 nm laser diode with only 2 mW of output power.(c) 2023 Optica Publishing Group