High Data-Rate Optical Wireless Communications in Passenger Aircraft: Measurements and Simulations

Airline passengers now expect 'movies on demand', games, telephone and other multimedia services to be provided at their seats, through all classes of service. The cabling and wired infrastructure to provide several hundred such connections is complex, heavy and makes reconfiguring the airliner seating patterns a time-consuming process. Wireless data transmission to seat-back terminals may therefore be advantageous and optical wireless may be an attractive means to achieve this. In this paper we report measurements and simulations of the optical wireless channel inside a mock-up of a commercial airliner cabin. These indicate that careful control of illumination and receiver field of view can create channels with the bandwidths likely to be required.