Demonstration of Wide-angle Beam Steering Optics in Wavelength-division-multiplexing Indoor Optical Wireless LAN with Dedicated CMOS Imager

We are developing a new indoor optical wireless LAN system, in which dedicated CMOS imagers are utilized to offer location-aware visually-intuitive wireless communications, wavelength- or space-division-multiplexing high-speed data transfer, and compact hardware. This paper focuses on a wide-angle beam steering optics, which is a key component to realize a compact and wide-angle optical transmitter accessible to the network from anywhere in a room with 5 m by 5 m size. A prototype beam steering lens designed for a near-infrared wavelength of an 850-nm band was fabricated and demonstrated. Experimental results show that the maximum output beam angle was about ±60 degrees, which covers the 5m-by-5m room (when the vertical distance between a hub and a node was 2.0 m), and the optical power efficiency was higher than 0.8 which equals to about 1dB loss.