Atmospheric Turbulence Resilient Optical Wireless Communication (OWC) using Silicon Photonics (SiPh) Programmable Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) Processor

We put forward and demonstrate a silicon photonics (SiPh) based integrated programmable multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) processor, which can improve channel extinction ratios (ERs) by mitigation of mode crosstalk in mode-division-multiplexed (MDM) optical wireless communication (OWC) transmission. The proposed integrated optical MIMO processor can reduce the receiver complexity, latency, and power consumption. Proof-of-concept experimental results show that the total data rate can be significantly enhanced from 9.75 Gbit/s to 50.7 Gbit/s after the optical MIMO processing with mode crosstalk reduction. The design and fabrication of the SiPh MIMO processor are also presented. Besides, different initial power distributions and enhancements at different levels of atmospheric turbulences are characterized and discussed.