Real-Time Optical Wireless Mobile Communication With High Physical Layer Reliability

As the use of optical wireless communication (OWC) in industrial production environments is gaining interest, it is necessary to consider the application's challenging requirements with respect to reliability and low latency. In this paper, we first analyze the factors limiting coverage and reliability in OWC. We discuss increased drive signal powers with an optional nonlinear post-equalizer, which improves the signal-to-noise ratio by an additional 3.5 dB. Further, spanning a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel and exploiting antenna diversity is shown to significantly increase the reliability of the OWC physical layer. The insights obtained from a series of experiments lead to a real-time demonstration of OWC with intrinsically high coverage and reliability. These first real-time results of OWC in an industrial production environment are discussed and physical layer data rates of up to 150 Mb/s with an average latency of <1 ms are shown.