Photonic applications in wireless terminal networks

Wireless communications are rapidly becoming the means of data and information transfer for a broad range of applications. As wireless communication applications continue to expand, the information transfer rates are evolving toward the Gigabit per second data rate and, for some applications, there is even a need for terabit per second data rate transfer in the wireless network. In addition, wireless terminals often require instantaneous switching and communications between network members. For most applications directional antennas are needed to support the high data throughput requirements, and phased array antennas are the only high gain, directional antennas that can be rapidly switched to provide instantaneous communications among network members scattered geographically. Wireless terminal equipment is currently designed to operate in the 1 to 60 GHz frequency range and, traditionally, these equipment are designed with RF hardware. More recently, optics technology has been demonstrated to play an important role in RF systems as the True-Time-Delay in the phased array antenna, and, for some systems operating at high data rates, optical interconnects at the baseband level require E-O and O-E conversions. This paper discusses the considerations in using optics technology in the design of the wireless terminal network including optical signal processing, optical backplanes, optical networking, optical interconnects, and optical components. This paper also describes the architecture of an RF wireless communications network using a range of optical technologies.