Prof. Shlomi Arnon

This letter presents a new unguided free-space optical bus design concept. The major difference between the design presented in this letter and existing line-of-sight free-space solutions is the paradoxical employment of interfering effects, such as scattering, multipath diffusion, and crosstalk, for the purpose of communication performance improvement. The multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication paradigm is used to explore the optical multipath that arises from these effects. The use of MIMO also diminishes the problems concerned with the alignment of communication devices over optical axes. A 2 × 2 optical bus model based on a Lambertian reflection scheme is analyzed. The maximum likelihood (ML) receiver is used to evaluate the bus performance. The outcome from this work is a mathematical model describing the performance of the MIMO bus as a function of the distance between the transmitter and receiver arrays.