Research Progress on One-to-Many Transmitting Antennas for Optical Wireless Communication

Optical antennas play the role of transmitting and receiving coupled optical signals in optical wireless communication, and a pair of multipoint transmitting antennas can expand optical wireless communication applications. This chapter summarizes the development of one-to-multipoint optical antennas at home and abroad and introduces the basic principles of optical fiber array structure, three-concentric sphere structure, and rotating paraboloid one-to-multipoint optical antenna. Finally, the development prospects of this field are foreseen. Optical wireless communication is an emerging communication technology with advantages of high speed, large capacity, and good security. However, the traditional optical wireless communication system has the limitation of single-to-single communication mode, which can’t satisfy the demand of multi-user simultaneous communication. Optical antenna plays the role of transmitting and receiving coupled optical signals in optical wireless communication, and a pair of multipoint transmitting antennas can expand the applications of optical wireless communication. The development of one-to-multipoint optical antennas at home and abroad is summarized, and the basic principle of one-to-multipoint optical antennas is introduced. Several existing one-to-multipoint optical antennas design schemes are discussed. Finally, the development trend of this field and the future development direction are prospected.