Sectored receivers for indoor wireless optical communication systems

This document proposes and studies a novel receiver structure for indoor optical wireless communication systems that exploits the directional nature in both signal and noise propagation through the use diversity techniques. In this document we concentrate on the ability of the proposed sectored receiver in combating the ambient noise. Significant optical power gains are demonstrated and are seen to increase with the relative weight of the directional noise within the cell, with the sharpness of the directional noise source beam width and in environments where there are noise sources positioned outside the cell. Also the SNR of a sectored receiver is seen to be much less sensitive to the position and beamwidth of the noise sources than the SNR of a non-sectored receiver allowing for more universal transceiver designs.