Ultrawide coverage receiver based on compound eye structure for free space optical communication

Free space optical communication (FSOC) is a potential technology for next generation communication. To reduce the construction cost for the receiving node in FSOC network, in this paper, we propose an ultrawide coverage (UC) receiver based on compound eye structure. The UC receiver consists of nine compound eye channels arranged in 3 rows multiply 3 columns. All the channels in the receiver use the same signal collecting system (SCS). Among the channels, the difference between the central channel and the non-central channel is that each non-central channel is equipped with a field of view (FOV) transform system to change the cover region and expend the coverage. Simulation results of coverage indicate that the effective coverage of the proposed system is 2.433sr, which is about 19.36% of the whole spherical space. Besides, when it works outside the presupposed blind distance, no blind zone coverage has achieved and the overlap rate of coverage is only 3.93%. Compared with the normal receiver with the same parameter, the coverage of the proposed receiver is increased by 57.6%. Moreover, performance simulation results show that, the average Bit Error Ratio (BER) of the proposed receiver is better than 2.47 × 10⁻⁶ in strong turbulence, which is enough to have a stable communication link. The new designed UC receiver has a great potential as an airborne suspended receiving node to establish FSOC network and may paves a new way for the design of FSOC receiver with an ultrawide coverage.