A 100-Gb/s Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Visible Laser Light Communication System

TLDR

Space‑division multiplexing significantly increases transmission capacity. The authors propose and experimentally demonstrate a 100‑Gb/s MIMO visible laser light communication system employing vertical‑cavity surface‑emitting lasers with 16‑QAM‑OFDM modulation. The system uses vertical‑cavity surface‑emitting lasers and 16‑QAM‑OFDM modulation, with a low‑noise amplifier and equalizer at the receiver to achieve good bit‑error‑rate performance and clear constellation maps. The system achieved 100‑Gb/s over 5‑m free‑space links using eight 16‑QAM‑OFDM channels, demonstrating good BER, clear constellations, and practical viability for free‑space optical communication.

Abstract

A 100-Gb/s multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) visible laser light communication (VLLC) system employing vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers with 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulating signals is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The transmission capacity of systems is significantly increased by space-division-multiplexing scheme. With the aid of low-noise amplifier and equalizer at the receiving site, good bit error rate performance and clear constellation map are obtained for each optical channel. A system of eight 16-QAM-OFDM channels over 5-m free-space links with a total data rate of 100 Gb/s (12.5 Gb/s/channel × 8 channels) is successfully achieved. Such a proposed MIMO VLLC system is shown to be a prominent one not only presents its convenience in free-space optical communication, but also reveals its potential for the real implementation.