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The growing demand for wireless connectivity is attracting interest in optical wireless communication (OWC) technique. In this paper, a filter-aided crosstalk mitigation scheme, employing digital Nyquist filters, is proposed to eliminate the trade-off between the spatial resolution and the channel capacity for the AWGR-based 2D infrared beam-steered indoor OWC system. By shaping the transmitted signal for narrow spectral occupancy, the inter-channel crosstalk resulting from the imperfect AWGR filtering can be avoided, which enables a denser AWGR grid. In addition, the spectral-efficient signal reduces the bandwidth requirement of the AWGR, which allows a low-complexity AWGR design. Thirdly, the proposed method is not sensitive to the wavelength misalignment between AWGRs and lasers, which relaxes the design of high wavelength stability lasers. Moreover, the proposed method is cost-efficient as we can make use of the mature DSP technique without additional optical components. The 20-Gbit/s data rate OWC capacity using PAM4 format has been experimentally demonstrated over a 6-GHz bandwidth-limited AWGR-based 1.1-m free-space link. The experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. By combining our proposed method with the polarization orthogonality technique, a promising capacity per beam of 40 Gbit/s is potentially attainable.

High-speed photonic networks using digital signal processing (DSP) techniques are flourishing nowadays to meet the high-bandwidth requirements of modern bandwidth-thirsty applications in a cost-effective manner. However, the additional latency introduced by DSP is hindering the latency-critical applications. In this paper, a FPGA-based real-time low-latency four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) receiver including digital adaptive equalization (DAE) is designed and implemented by using a latency-reducing parallel architecture. The DSP-introduced latency in the receiver end is analyzed in detail. As for DAE parallel implementation, a novel re-allocation scheme is proposed to cope with the issue of the dependency of the output on the successive input samples, and a look-ahead computation technique is introduced to improve the adaptive update efficiency. A real-time PAM-4 receiver is demonstrated in an experimental fiber link with 2.5 Gbit/s data rate for the performance evaluation. Compared with offline processing with MATLAB, the BER performance has little deterioration at 7% FEC limit of 1 × 10−3. With the help of the proposed deep-parallel technique, the DSP-introduced latency is reduced to 0.4μs on average, which better meets the requirements of latency-sensitive user cases in 5G networks. Furthermore, the real-time PAM-4 receiver could be flexibly reconfigured for various scenarios with low-latency requirements, and the latency-efficient parallel technique as well as the latency analysis method can also be extended to high-speed hardware implementation for data rates up to 100 Gbit/s or more.

We experimentally demonstrate a two-dimensional (2D) passive optical beam-steering module constructed using reflection and transmission gratings for angular coverage of 12.2°×5.6° with seven scanning lines. We vigorously evaluate the 2D beam-steered system with OOK, 4-PAM and DMT transmission.