Development of high-speed FSO transmission link for the implementation of 5G and Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) enables the inter-connectivity of different "things" using which wide range of items and devices can communicate with each other and their external environment. 5G technology offers enhanced quality of service with high-data transmission rates, which necessitates the implementation of IoT in 5G architecture. Free space optics (FSO) is considered as a promising technology that can offer high-speed information transmission links and therefore is an optimal choice for wireless networks to satisfy the full potential of 5G technology offering 100 Gbit/s or more speed. By implementing 5G features in IoT, the coverage area and performance of IoT will be enhanced using high-speed FSO links. This work proposes the development of high-speed long-reach FSO link for the implementation of 5G and IoT. We investigate a long-haul, single-channel polarization division multiplexed 16-level quadrature amplitude modulation (PDM-16-QAM) based FSO link at 160 Gbit/s incorporating digital signal processing with coherent detection at the receiver terminal. The results show that the proposed system demonstrates a good bit error rate performance under different weather conditions. The proposed system can be deployed for high-speed, long-haul, spectral efficient, robust information transmission links in future 5G wireless networks under dynamic weather conditions.