Design and Characterisation of Terabit/s Capable Compact Localisation and Beam-Steering Terminals for Fiber-Wireless-Fiber Links
Ravinder Singh, Feng Feng, Yang Hong, Grahame Faulkner, R.G. Deshmukh, Guillaume Vercasson, Olivier Bouchet, Periklis Petropoulos, Dominic O’Brien
Abstract
This article presents the design, implementation, and characterisation of compact fiber-wireless-fiber (FWF) localisation and beam-steering terminals, which provide a bi-directional free-space connection between fiber optic transceivers. The use of simple mirror based beam-steering, with high localisation accuracy in both steering axes enables ultra-high data rate transmission and practical indoor coverage. The auto-aligned terminals have a tracking accuracy of 0.02°, a full angle field-of-view (FoV) of 50°, a tracking latency of 200 ms, and work at wavelengths between 1300-1700 nm. In an offline data processing experimental setup,1 Tbit/s free-space transmission capability is demonstrated over a 2.54 m <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> coverage area using ten wavelength division multiplexed PAM-4 signals. Further, full-duplex, real-time, data transmission using off-the-shelf small form-factor pluggable (SFP) optical transceivers is also demonstrated for virtual reality (VR) application. Here, using standard 10 G SFP+ transceivers without the use of any pre/post optical amplification, the auto-aligned FWF terminals achieve 4.9 m <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> localisation and 3.14 m <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> bidirectional communications coverage over a range of ~4 m.