Optical Design and Multipath Analysis for Broadband Optical Wireless in an Aircraft Passenger Cabin Application

The design of an optical wireless system for a typical aircraft cabin based on a Boeing 777 will be presented. Optical wireless is ideal for such applications, as there is no potential for interference with avionics, which is a major concern regarding the use of radio frequency devices on board an aircraft. The choice of wavelength with regard to eye safety and ambient lighting levels will be considered. A realistic aircraft cabin geometry will be modeled, and ray-tracing simulations using this model will be performed. Using the ray-trace information, together with an optimization process, the method of designing the optical sources to achieve uniformity of signal distribution within the cabin will be presented. The peak-to-peak variation in the signal intensity for the targeted aisle positions was obtained to be less than 5%. Using the ray-trace information to obtain the multipath information, a communications model is used to determine the performance of the optical wireless system under ambient noise and multipath interference. For a bit error rate (BER) of 10^-9 with equalization, a bit rate of more than 170 Mb/s is shown. A transmission bit rate of more than 400 Mb/s is achievable if the acceptable BER is raised to 10^-3 .