This review paper discusses the complete evolution of free-space optical (FSO) communication, also known as unguided optical communication (UOC) technologies, all the way back to ancient man’s fire to today’s machine-learning-supported UOC systems. The principles, significance, and developments that have happened over the past several decades, as well as installation methodologies, technological limitations, and today’s challenges of UOCs are presented. All the subsets of UOC: FSO communication, underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC), and visible light communication (VLC), with their technology/system developments, potential applications, and limitations are reviewed. The state-of-the-art developments/achievements in (i) FSO channel effects and their mitigation techniques; (ii) radio-over-FSO techniques; (iii) wavelength division multiplexing and sub-carrier multiplexing techniques; (iv) FSO for worldwide interoperability for microwave access applications; (v) space optical satellite communication (SOSC); (vi) UWOC; (vii) photoacoustic communication (PAC); (viii) light-fidelity; (ix) VLC; (x) vehicular VLC (V²LC); and (xi) optical camera communication are reviewed. In addition, the current developments on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (to improve the performance of UOC systems), energy harvesting (for the effective utilization of UOC channels), and near-future communication network scenarios (mandatory for secured broadband digital links) are covered. Finally, in brief, to achieve the full potential of UOC systems, challenges that require immediate research attention are summarized.

Focal-spot wandering is the main cause for the major power loss in free-space optical communications. Thus,mitigating it is a primary requirement for the successful performance improvement. In order to prove this prerequisite, an experimental set-up using 155-Mbps data transmission is built for the link range of 0.5 km at an altitude of 15.25 m. In the experiment, the receiver is equiped with a control system to stabilize the received optical propagation at the detector plane which is called as focal-spot wandering mitigation control so as to couple the power in bucket perfectly to the photodetector. The performance improvements due to mitigating focal-spot wandering are regressively investigated in terms of various quality assessment key parameters. Maximum radial distance of 0.25 mm, maximum effective scintillation index of 0.17, optical signal-to-noise ratio of 9 dB, minimum eye-opening of ±0.37 V, minimum eye-height of ±0.51 V, controlled bit-error-rate of 6.45 × 10⁻⁹ to 7.09 × 10⁻⁸ and the link margin of 1.83 dB are attained even during strong turbulence level while mitigating focal-spot wandering.

High rainfall in the rainy season can last about six months, this makes it rain continuously and cause an increase in the volume of water that has the potential for flooding. While the public does not get information or notice directly when it will happen. To anticipate these problems, the design of a water level monitoring system as an early flood detection based on IoT is considered efficient. The system will detect the distance of the sensor to the surface of the water, if the distance of the surface water approaches the sensor, the system will sound the siren as a sign of flooding. The system will display the alert status that occurs and the water surface distance in realtime.. From 100 data of water surface distance with ultrasonic sensors that have been tested, get 6 times the distance reading error. In testing of several water surface distances with sensors, the system can store all distance data into a database.

MJT Makara Journal of Technology

We propose an optical spatial filter (OSF) method to suppress beam wander and spatial noise effects. Signal from random displacements of the focus spot around the optical axis within the constricted area is collected. This method advantageously suppresses fluctuations in signal intensity. The OSF consists of a pinhole and cone reflector. The pinhole produces Fresnel diffraction on the focus spot. The cone reflector provides directed reflectance onto the pinhole for random focus spot displacements due to beam wander. The calculations of signal power are based on fluctuations of signal intensity that are minimized by the circular aperture function of the pinhole and the cosine of the reflectance angle from the cone reflector. The method is applied to free-space optical communications at a wavelength of 1.55 μm with an atmospheric chamber to provide optical propagation media. Based on calculations, the beam wander angles that can be received by the OSF are from 14.0° to 28.0°. Moreover, based on experiment, the OSF with a pinhole diameter of 20.0 μm and cone reflector diameter of 1.5 mm produces signal power of −15.3 dBm. Both calculations and experiment show that the OSF enhances the received signal power in the presence of turbulence.

IJTech International Journal of Technology