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.