Highly Efficient Optical Beam Steering Using an In-Fiber Diffraction Grating for Full Duplex Indoor Optical Wireless Communication

Diffraction gratings have been widely used in wavelength-controlled nonmechanical laser beam steering for high data-rate indoor optical wireless communications. Existing free-space diffraction gratings suffer from inherent difficulties of limited diffraction efficiency, bulky configuration, high cos...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of lightwave technology 2018-10, Vol.36 (19), p.4618-4625
Main Authors: Guoqing Wang, Habib, Usman, Zhijun Yan, Gomes, Nathan J., Qingmei Sui, Jun-Bo Wang, Lin Zhang, Chao Wang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bandwidths
Beam steering
Diffraction
Diffraction efficiency
Fiber lasers
Free-space optical communication
Gratings (spectra)
Laser beams
Lasers
Light emission
microwave photonics
optical diffraction
Optical fiber devices
Optical fibers
Optical wireless
optical wireless communication
tilted fiber gratings
Wireless communication
Wireless communications
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Summary:Diffraction gratings have been widely used in wavelength-controlled nonmechanical laser beam steering for high data-rate indoor optical wireless communications. 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 paper, 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 multiuser full duplex optical wireless communications has been verified in experiments. About 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.
ISSN:0733-8724
1558-2213
DOI:10.1109/JLT.2018.2832200