Tracking System for Optical Mobile Communication and the Design Rules

Free space optical communication has been applied in many scenarios because of its security, low cost and high rates. In such scenarios, a tracking system is necessary to ensure an acceptable signal power. Free space optical links were considered unable to support optical mobile communication when nodes are randomly moving at a high speed because existing tracking schemes fail to track the nodes accurately and rapidly. In this paper, we propose a novel tracking system exploiting multiple beacon laser sources. At the receiver, each beacon laser's power is measured to estimate the orientation of the target. Unlike existing schemes which drive servo motors multiple times based on consecutive measurements and feedback, our scheme can directly estimate the next optimal targeting shift for the servo motors based on a single measurement, allowing the tracking system to converge much faster. Closed-form outage probability expression is derived for the optical mobile communication system with ideal tracking, where pointing error and moving statistics are considered. To maintain sufficient average power and reduce the outage probability, the recommended size of a source spot is expressed in closed form as a function of the target's statistics of random moving, providing insights to the system design.