Indoor Optical Wireless Communication Coverage Optimization Using a SiPM Photoreceiver

Although optical wireless communication (OWC) is seen as a promising complementary technology to radio frequency systems, its deployment is currently hampered by its limited communication range and the lack of compactness of its transceivers. A partial solution lies in using more sensitive photoreceivers, such as arrays of single photon avalanche diodes (SPAD). Despite their limited bandwidth and non-linearity, such devices have been shown to support Gbps data transmission while providing greatly enhanced sensitivity compared to conventional photodiodes (PD). However, their potential to increase the communication coverage of an indoor OWC system has never been studied. In this paper, a simulation framework for evaluating this metric using a SPAD-based indoor OWC system is thus detailed and implemented. Results show that an array of SPADs in the order of a mm(2) is enough to ensure connectivity over a whole 16 m(2) room, whereas similar performance with a PD requires a sensitive area of several hundreds of mm(2), hence demonstrating the interest of SPADs for coverage as well as compactness optimization in OWC.