| Summary |
Driven by the ever-increasing demand for higher capacity for indoor industrial applications, multiple-input-multiple-output optical wireless communication (MIMO-OWC) systems can be considered as a potential candidate to ensure better reliability and flexibility in such challenging and harsh environments. Most of the MIMO-OWC systems have mainly targeted high data rate communication over short distances, not exceeding 10 m. In this research, we aim to further speed up the communication while increasing the link range. We thus elaborate a comparative study on the application of a newly proposed optical linear transmitting array with two new receiver configurations, i.e., a one-dimensional receiving arrangement and an imaging receiver design using a telephoto lens placed in front of the receiving element array. The performance of the two proposed systems is then analytically and experimentally evaluated. We demonstrate that the MIMO-OWC system using an imaging receiver can ensure better performance at longer distances surpassing the conventional MIMO-OWC system with the linear arrangement, whereas at shorter distances the latter demonstrates a better transmission quality.
Furthermore, the experimental results confirm that our proposed systems have the potential for higher data rates over longer distances and can be used as a hybrid solution. |