Beam Power and Angle Adaptation in Multibeam 2.5 Gbit/s Spot Diffusing Mobile Optical Wireless System

Mobility can induce significant signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance degradation in optical wireless (OW) systems based on diffuse as well as spot-diffusing configurations. Two methods (beam angle and beam power adaptation) are introduced to the design of OW multibeam systems to effectively mitigate the mobility-based performance degradation in the presence of ambient light noise, multipath propagation, and shadowing. Simulation results indicate that in an angle diversity multibeam system, the SNR is independent of the transmitter position and can be maximized at all receiver locations when our new methods are implemented. A multibeam power and angle adaptive system (MBPAAS) offers a significant SNR improvement of 29 dB over the traditional line strip multibeam system (LSMS) at a transmitter-receiver separation of 6 m, when both systems employ an angle diversity receiver and operate at 50 Mbit/s. This improvement comes at the cost of complexity. The complexity can be reduced by increasing the beam angle adaptation step size from 2.3 degrees to 26.6 degrees resulting in a typical search time reduction from 12.5 ms to 80 mu s when our modified MBPAAS replaces the main MBPAAS. However, a power penalty of 11.7 dB at receiver locations near the room edges and 1.3 dB elsewhere can be induced. An increase in the channel bandwidth from 647 MHz (LSMS) to 5.57 GHz can also be achieved when the two new methods (beam angle and beam power adaptation) are implemented. The increase in channel bandwidth and SNR can enable the OW system to achieve higher data rates and 2.5 Gbit/s and 5 Gbit/s mobile OW systems are shown to be feasible. Furthermore, simulation results prove that our modified MBPAAS can sufficiently combat shadowing and signal blockage.