Open Collections

Ultrafast multi-directional devices for optical wireless communications

University of British Columbia

Optical wireless communications (OWC) has become an increasingly attractive technology for dense urban environments, as it merges the high-speed capability of optical communications with the mobility of wireless operation. Early generations of OWC systems are now emerging as indoor (e.g., Li-Fi) networks and outdoor (e.g., free-space optical) links. Unlike contemporary point-to-point fibre-optic networks, however, these OWC systems typically demand bi-/multi- directional operations between distributed transceivers. With this in mind, various forms of multi-directional optical wireless transceivers are presented in this dissertation. A corner-cube (CC) optical wireless transceiver is introduced first, with orthogonal photoconductive (PC) switches facilitating OWC operation over a solid angle of π/2 steradians. The CC-PC transceiver is capable of simultaneous photodetection (via PC switches operating at a gigahertz bandwidth), optical retroflection (via a CC architecture operating over a solid angle of π/2 steradians), and optical modulation (via a liquid crystal modulator operating at a kilohertz bandwidth). The capabilities of the multi-directional optical wireless transceiver are then extended through the introduction of a spherical (SP) optical wireless transceiver. The SP-PC transceiver offers improved performance over that of the CC-PC transceiver. It is capable of simultaneous photodetection (via PC switches operating at a gigahertz bandwidth), optical retroflection (via refraction over a solid angle of 4π steradians), and optical modulation (via all-optical modulation at a terahertz bandwidth). The proposed optical wireless transceivers are well-suited to the demands of bi-directional OWC networks, with active downlink and passive uplink operation, and they yield great potential for future implementations of OWC networks.

Text

2016-06-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/58364

Electrical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/