A Novel Receiver Based on Rotational Double Prisms for Optical Wireless Communication

Optical wireless communication (OWC) has the potential to be applied in indoor, outdoor, and vehicle-to-vehicle communications for its lager bandwidth, high data rate and high security. Optical devices usually need communication link align-ment in the OWC system, which can be realized with universal joints and fast steering mirrors to avoid the alignment error caused by atmospheric turbulence and bad weather. However, optical devices such as universal joints and fast steering mirrors have the disadvantages of inflexible and incompact structure because of its large size, which is unsuitable for small communication systems. To overcome these disadvantages, a novel receiver for the OWC system is proposed in this paper, which mainly uses double prisms to deflect light to the photodiodes (PDs). The proposed receiver system is compact and of small volume, which can receive signals in a large angle range. In addition, a light deflection algorithm is designed for the receiver to make the light converge to the PDs. The simulation results show that the receiver can receive light within the divergence angle of 40°and achieve g00d alignment,