OPTICAL WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

The growing demand of bandwidth in this modern internet age has been testing the existing telecommunication infrastructures around the world. With broadband speeds moving towards the region of Gbps and Tbps, many researches have begun on the development of using optical wireless technology as feasible and future methods to the current wireless technology. Unlike the existing radio frequency wireless applications, optical wireless uses electromagnetic spectrums that are unlicensed and free. With that, this project aim to understand and gain better understanding of optical wireless communication system by building an experimental and simulated model. The quality of service and system performance will be investigated and reviewed. This project employs laser diode as the propagation medium and successfully transferred audio signals as far as 15 meters. On its quality of service, results of the project model reveal that the bit error rate increases, signal-to-noise ratio and quality factor decreases as the link distance between the transmitter and receiver increases. OptiSystem was used to build the simulated model and MATLAB was used to assist signal-to-noise ratio calculations. By comparing the simulated and experimental receiver's power output, the experimental model's efficiency is at 66.3%. Other than the system's performance, challenges and factors affecting the system have been investigated and discussed. Such challenges include beam divergence, misalignment and particle absorption.