On the design of efficient fiber-wireless architectures to enable multigigabit visible light communication

Abstract

The surge in demand for wireless communication has placed significant strain on existing radio networks, which are struggling to accommodate the rapidly increasing number of mobile and fixed wireless devices. In response to this challenge, industry and academia have collaborated to explore alternative radio access technologies capable of supporting this continuous growth. Visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as a promising alternative due to the hundreds of terahertz of unlicensed bandwidth available for wireless communication. Despite its undisputable potential for ultrahigh-speed communication, the interface between the VLC wireless access and the fiber distribution network is still largely unexplored. Notably, this issue becomes more challenging when dealing with multicolored VLC systems, such as those employing RGB multiplexing. Following this research gap, in this work, we focus our attention on the design of efficient optical/electrical interfaces that can synergistically merge the fiber and VLC sections of an integrated fiber-wireless network. To that end, two fundamental architectural options are proposed and experimentally assessed, resorting to either optical or electrical multiplexing of the VLC constituent colors. From our experimental analysis, similar RGB-VLC data rates of 13–15 Gbit/s could be achieved using both fiber-wireless interface architectures. The choice of the most adequate solution is then fundamentally dependent on a number of network design options and requirements. While electrical multiplexing is deemed to enable more spectrally efficient utilization of the fiber transport network, optical multiplexing provides a simpler infrared-to-visible interface using cost-efficient commercial off-the-shelf equipment.