Abstract
Diffraction gratings have been widely used in wavelength-controlled non-mechanical laser beam steering for high data-rate indoor optical wireless communications (OWC). Existing free-space diffraction gratings suffer from inherent difficulties of limited diffraction efficiency, bulky configuration, high cost and significant coupling loss with optical fiber links. In this work, a new optical approach for highly efficient, compact and fiber compatible laser beam steering using an in-fiber diffraction grating is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for the first time to our best knowledge. In-fiber diffraction is made possible based on a 45° tilted fiber grating (TFG), where wavelength dependent lateral scattering is obtained due to the strongly tilted grating structure. Improved diffraction efficiency of 93.5% has been achieved. In addition, the 45° TFG works perfectly for both light emission and reception, enabling full-duplex optical wireless transmission. Utility of the 45° TFG in all-fiber laser beam steering for multi-user full duplex optical wireless communications has been verified in experiments. 1.4 m free-space full-duplex wireless transmission has been demonstrated with data rate up to 12 Gb/s per beam using 2.4 GHz bandwidth OFDM signals.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 4618-4625 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Journal of Lightwave Technology |
Volume | 36 |
Issue number | 19 |
Early online date | 1 May 2018 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Oct 2018 |
Bibliographical note
© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Funding: Horizon 2020 Framework Programme; H2020 Marie Skaodowska-Curie Actions; FP7 People: Marie-Curie Actions; National Natural Science Foundation of China
Keywords
- Beam steering
- microwave photonics
- optical diffraction
- optical wireless communication
- tilted fiber gratings