Abstract

Traditional optical wireless systems use electrical-to-optical and optical-to-electrical conversions on its transmitting and receiving terminals, respectively.¹ Commercial systems offer up to 1.5 Gbps rates. Few companies announced 2.5 Gbps systems. 2.5 Gbps seems to be the maximum practical rate for systems based on regeneration due to receiver performance limitations. However, higher bit-rates and DWDM traffic are needed for metro networks and disaster recovery applications as bandwidth requirements increase. Some experimental works presented higher bandwidth transmission^2,3,4 but none of them was based on a full operational system that exhibits long-term stability and enables cascading of links. All-Optical wireless communication is considered to be the next generation of optical wireless communication. Such systems will carry DWDM traffic with 10 Gbps rate per channel and will be a true fiber replacement in terms of capacity and reliability for short distances.

© 2002 Optical Society of America