High-Capacity Optical Wireless Communication Using Two-Dimensional IR Beam Steering

The free-space narrow infrared beams can offer unprecedented data capacity to devices individually, as they can provide non-shared connections that have a large link power budget. By means of a fully passive module based on a high port count arrayed waveguide grating router (AWGR), many infrared beams can be 2D steered individually using wavelength tuning. By applying the defocusing techniques, a compact beam steering module has been realized. A simultaneous communication at up to 112 Gbit/s PAM-4 per beam has been shown with an 80-ports AWGR, thus offering a total wireless throughput beyond 8.9 Tbit/s. The wireless provisioning of multiple ultrahigh-definition video streams has been demonstrated in a proof-of-concept laboratory setup.