IEEE Photonics Journal (Jan 2015)

A 20-m/40-Gb/s 1550-nm DFB LD-Based FSO Link

  • Wen-Shing Tsai,
  • Hai-Han Lu,
  • Chung-Yi Li,
  • Ting-Chieh Lu,
  • Chen-Hong Liao,
  • Chien-An Chu,
  • Peng-Chun Peng

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/JPHOT.2015.2506172
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 6
pp. 1 – 7

Abstract

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An innovative free-space optical (FSO) link using laser light propagation to achieve transmission rate of 40 Gb/s at a wavelength of 1550 nm is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Over a 20-m free-space link, brilliant bit-error-rate performance and clear eye diagram are obtained in the proposed 1550-nm distributed feedback (DFB) laser diode (LD)-based FSO links. As far as we know, it is the first time that a 1550-nm externally modulated laser transmitter cascaded with an erbium-doped fiber amplifier and a pair of fiber collimators to successfully set up a 20-m/40-Gb/s FSO link has been employed. Compared with the 680-nm vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser-based FSO link, this proposed 1550-nm DFB LD-based FSO link is attractive not only because it has longer free-space transmission distance but because it supplies higher bandwidth operation as well. Such a 1550-nm DFB LD-based FSO link provides the benefits of optical wireless communications for longer transmission distance and higher transmission rate, which is thoroughly helpful for optical wireless network applications.

Keywords