The free-space narrow infrared beams can offer unprecedented data capacity to devices individually, as they can provide non-shared connections that have a large link power budget. By means of a fully passive module based on a high port count arrayed waveguide grating router (AWGR), many infrared beams can be 2D steered individually using wavelength tuning. By applying the defocusing techniques, a compact beam steering module has been realized. A simultaneous communication at up to 112 Gbit/s PAM-4 per beam has been shown with an 80-ports AWGR, thus offering a total wireless throughput beyond 8.9 Tbit/s. The wireless provisioning of multiple ultrahigh-definition video streams has been demonstrated in a proof-of-concept laboratory setup.

By means of narrow 2D-steerable infrared beams, interference-free individual wireless connections to densely-spaced devices in industry 4.0 settings can be made. Beam steering by fiber-fed passive diffractive beam steering modules and wavelength-tunable transceivers located in a separate controller location enable readily scalable connectivity to many devices and their nomadic mobility. To accommodate the dynamics in industry 4.0 settings, self-calibrating localization of the devices by means of retro-reflecting corner cube foils and beam scanning is demonstrated, and a low-complexity broadband wide field-of-view optical wireless receiver is presented, based on a matrix of photodiodes.

By means of narrow infrared beams very high capacity wireless links can be set up to users individually, while also offering high privacy and high energy efficiency. Accurate device localization for steering the beams is required. This has been achieved within the 10cm pico-cell resolution of a 2D beam-steered optical wireless communication system by applying a matrix of miniature corner-cube retro-reflectors. The localization process is self-calibrating, and does not need power-consuming elements at the receiver. In an indoor laboratory system setup, real-time transfer of multiple 10GbE high-definition video streams has been demonstrated.

A wide-scan and broadband focal-plane array (FPA) concept is introduced in this article, which provides high antenna gain and effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) with electronic beamsteering within a relatively large field of view (FoV), up to +/-20°. The antenna uses a bifocal double-reflector concept that optimizes the illumination of the focal-plane region. In this way, we have reduced the required size of the feed array and have maximized the number of simultaneously active array elements. By using a photonics beamformer, a broadband system for the 20-40-GHz band can be created with a fiber-based interface to a central processing unit. This hybrid antenna system is a very interesting concept for future 5G and beyond [5G millimeter-wave (mm-wave) base stations, two-way satellite communication systems, and point-to-point wireless backhaul systems]. A silicon BiCMOS low-noise amplifier (LNA) and a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) for the optical beamformer have been developed and integrated into the overall system. A system-level demonstrator was developed and experimentally validated in receive mode. Our concept provides an antenna gain of more than 40 dBi over an FoV of +/-15° at 28.5 GHz.

Scalability and photonic integration of packet switched cross-connect nodes that utilize all-optical signal processing is a crucial issue that eventually determines the future role of photonic signal processing in optical networks. We present a 1times4 all-optical packet switch based on label swapping technique that utilizes a scalable and asynchronous label processor and label rewriter. By combining N in-band labels at different wavelengths (within the bandwidth of the payload), up to 2N possible addresses can be encoded. The proposed label processor requires only N active devices to process the 2^N addresses that makes this label processing technique scalable with the number of addresses. Experimental results showed error-free packet switching operation at 160 Gb/s. The label erasing and new label insertion operation introduces only 0.5 dB of power penalty. These results indicate a potential utilization of the presented technique in a multi-hop packet switched network.