Remote-Powered Infrared Indoor Optical Wireless Communication Systems

Near-infrared optical wireless communications (OWCs) have been widely studied in indoor environments, and the beam steering has been widely used to achieve both high-speed and wide coverage. Compared with active steering, the passive method eliminates the need for local power supply at OWC access points. However, current passive beam steering is based on wavelength tuning, which requires precisely controlled and costly tunable lasers. In this letter, we propose a beam-steered indoor OWC system without the need for local power through remote powering, providing the benefits of low power consumption, passive OWC access points, and low-cost. The proposed remote-powered indoor OWC system is experimentally demonstrated with 10 Gb/s OWC provided to users. An indirect remote powering scheme is also proposed and realized to support large-scale OWC access points.