Cost-efficient half-duplex 10-Gbit/s all-optical indoor optical wireless communication enabled by a low-cost Fabry-Perot laser/photodetector

To develop an indoor optical wireless communication (OWC) system, both the system complexity/cost and data rate need to be taken into consideration. In this Letter, a cost-efficient half-duplex OWC system for photonic home area network applications is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. A low-cost Fabry–Perot laser diode is proposed to be employed as both the downlink receiver (Rx) and uplink transmitter at the user side. Enabled by the Fabry–Perot transceiver, the indoor transmission of 10 Gbit/s four-level pulse-amplitude-modulation signal for both downlinks and uplinks is experimentally achieved over a 1.7 km single-mode fiber and 1.1 m free space. Moreover, the proposed scheme also enables us to operate an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal. The bit error rate levels of multi-gigabit OFDM data for both downlinks and uplinks over a 10 h measurements are all under a 7% forward error correction limit of 3.8 × 10− 3 , which indicates that the proposed system is robust and, thus, can provide a promising solution for high-speed low-cost home area OWC networks