Performance of an Optical Pyramidal Fly-eye Diversity Receiver for Indoor Wireless Communication Systems in the Presence of Background Noise and Multipath Dispersion

An investigation into the optical wireless system performance has been carried out for both a conventional hybrid system (CHS) with a single detector under various receiver fields-ofview (FOV) and a pyramidal fly-eye diversity receiver (PFDR) with different FOVs. Original results for a hybrid system that employs a PFDR, under different FOVs, are presented. It is demonstrated, through FOV optimisation of both the CHS and the PFDR, that the CHS performance is more severely affected by background noise and multipath dispersion than a PFDR system. Furthermore, SNR results are presented demonstrating that our optimised PFDR antenna gives about 4 dB improvements over the CHS. It is also demonstrated that the pulse spread induced by the multipath dispersion is significantly reduced when the PFDR receiver FOV is set to its optimum value.