Power smart in-door optical wireless link applications

Presented in this paper are the design and applications of a power smart in-door optical wireless link suitable for use in situations where the link distance changes. The design provides lossless beam propagation between the Transmitter (T) and Receiver (R) using agile optics. In addition this design also provides the capability to form a large field of view (FOV) search beam that can aid in the alignment of the T/R units. A proof of concept experiment is presented using a link length that varied from 1 m to 4 m with an optical link loss improvement of 53% over an unconditioned beam at the maximum design distance of 4 m. A less than 7% optical link loss is achieved over the whole variable range of the link distance. Applications for the proposed optical link include wireless communication for mobile computing and agile wireless interconnections for server rack wireless. The T/R units can also deploy camera optics and thermal energy harvesting electronics to improve link operational smartness and efficiency. This is followed by a discussion about using this link design for underwater and out-door applications.