Building Blocks for Mobile Free-Space-Optical

Networks

Jayasri Akella, Chang Liu, David Partyka, Murat Yuksel,

Shiv Kalyanaraman, and Partha Dutta
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Emails: sri@networks.ecse.rpi.edu, yuksem@ecse.rpi.edu

: “shiv rpi”
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Shivkumar Kalyanaraman
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 Outline
❑ Context and Motivation

❑ Auto-configurable optical antenna design.

❑ Tessellated Spherical Optical Antenna
❑ Auto-alignment Circuit
❑ Mobility Experiment

❑ Simulating Mobile FSO Networks

❑ Results and summary

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 Bringing Optical Communications and Ad Hoc
Networking Together…

Free-Space-Optical Ad Hoc
Communications (FSO) Networking

High bandwidth Mobile communication

Low power Auto-configuration
Directional

Free-Space-Optical
Ad Hoc Networks

Spatial reuse and angular diversity in nodes

Low power and secure
Electronic auto-alignment
Optical auto-configuration (switching, routing)

This paper proposes initial building blocks for this vision…

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 Current Commercial FSO

Point-to-Point Links in dense metros, competing with “wires”

and “leased lines”
Issues: How to achieve link reliability/availability despite weather
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 Current RF-Based Ad Hoc Networks
❑ 802.1x with omni-directional RF antennas
❑ High-power – typically the most power
consuming part of laptops
❑ Low bandwidth – typically the bottleneck
link in the chain
❑ Error-prone, high losses

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 Contributions: Ad-hoc FSO BBlocks
❑ New optical antenna design
❑ Spherical/Honeycomb structure with FSO trans-receiver
modules
❑ Potential: logical links function even when antennas are in
relative motion.

❑ Auto-configuration circuit that enables physical FSO channel

handoff
❑ Integrated with optical antenna design

❑ Simulation models in ns-2 to enable future studies of FSO

MANETs
❑ Initial tests suggest need to revisit routing and TCP layer
designs
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 FSO Basics
❑ High-brightness LEDs (HBLEDs) are very low cost and highly reliable
components
❑ 35-65 cents a piece, 10 years lifetime
❑ Low power consumption (100 microwatts for 10-100 Mbps!)
❑ 4-5 orders of magnitude improvement in energy/bit compared to RF
❑ Directional => Huge spatial reuse
❑ But…FSO also requires:
❑ availability of unobstructed line-of-sight (LOS) and,
❑ alignment of LOS between the transmitter and the receiver.

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 LOS Alignment: Optical Antenna Concept
❑ Tessellated spheres with trans-
receiver pairs
❑ Line-of-sight (LOS) auto-alignment
electronics
❑ Rapid alignment & handoff =>
enables mobility or sway, while
maintaining the logical link.

LED

PD

(a) Tessellated Sphere b) Showing a Line of Sight Sphere

Tessellated with LED+PD transceivers.
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 Auto-Alignment Circuit Design
❑ Pilot signal sent
❑ If aligned, signal is
fed-back
❑ Feedback signal
detection =>
alignment!
❑ Handoff logical link
& transmit data

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 Alignment Circuit (Contd)

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 Optical antenna: Multiple Alignment Circuits
Universal Mounting
sockets of LED/PDs

❑ Multiple channels =>

❑ Connected to a bank of
auto-alignment circuits
❑ Eg: 4-circuit block diagram Universal Interface of the
wires of the LED/PDs
Interface to
shown below the local
network

Board (Controllor)

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 Optical antenna: Experimental Platform (Contd)

❑ LEDs: high divergence angle

❑ PDs: angular field of view
=> the LED-PD pair forms a
transceiver cone.

❑ The transceiver cone covers a

significant volume of 3-
dimensional space.

❑ Key: appropriate packing density

to cover entire 360 steradian of
surrounding space.

Tessellated Spherical antennas on stable

optical testing platforms
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In Action: 4-channel spherical optical antenna

Not Aligned: Searching phase to Aligned: Data Transmission

locate an LOS (all channels phase (only one channel
searching) active)

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 Mobility Experiment
❑ UDP data transfer between the moving toy train on a circular track and a
data-sink at the center of the circle.

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 Auto-alignment: Search Phase

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 Auto-alignment: Aligned!
Data Transfer Phase

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 Intensity vs Mobility @ The optical antenna

70
60 Aligned
Light Intensity (lux)

50 Not aligned
40
30
Detector
20 Threshold
10
0
0
11
17
23
33

65
72
79

105
112
121
128
40.5
51.5

88.5
97.5
Angular Position of the Train (degree)
Denser packing will allow fewer interruptions (and smaller
buffering), but more handoffs
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 Simulation Model: Mobile Ad-Hoc FSO nodes
❑ NS-2 Model:
❑ FSO propagation model (weather effects)
❑ FSO antennas (sphere model)
❑ Additional parameters:
❑ directional normals, transmission and
receiving angles
❑ … to assist the propagation model and LOS
calculations.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Shivkumar Kalyanaraman

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 Mobile FSO Simulation (Contd)
❑ Initial proof-of-concept:
❑ 2-D scenario on the XY-
plane
❑ Spatial reuse and angular
diversity features
illustrated.

❑ Single mobile FSO node

❑ Circles around four
stationary FSO nodes

❑ Stationary nodes are

connected via wired links to
a single central node.

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 Simple Experiments…
❑ Four experiments, varying:
❑ Speed of mobile node and
❑ Distance of the mobile node from the central node

Experiment Mobile Node’s Velocity Mobile Node’s Path Radius

1 1.5 meters/second 25 meters

2 1.5 meters/second 35 meters

3 2.5 meters/second 25 meters

4 2.5 meters/second 35 meters

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 TCP sequence numbers in Experiment 1

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 Experiment 1: Data Transfer in Bursts After LOS discovery

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 Experiment 2: Higher distance => TCP interactions & lower
throughput

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 Experiment 3: Lower distance, higher speeds

TCP affected by higher loss rates & periodic disconnections

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 Observations
❑ Need dense tessellation and packing.
❑ Need rapid auto-alignment
❑ TCP may be affected with increasing distance and speed.
❑ End-to-end connection is not the same as physical link
alignment

❑ Key:
❑ Need to provide either bit-level buffering and/or
❑ Link-layer hybrid ARQ/FEC to mask such losses from TCP

❑ Interactions with transport and network level protocols will

need to be studied and optimized…
❑ Ongoing work…
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 Indoor Ad-Hoc FSO: Music App

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 Summary
❑ Ad-hoc FSO communication:
❑ Different from pt-pt FSO and ad-hoc RF
❑ Key building blocks:
❑ Optical antenna: tessellated sphere with dense packing of trans-
receivers
❑ Auto-Alignment optoelectronic circuit (simple feedback design)
❑ Absence of mechanical parts such as motors or moving mirrors
typically used for auto-alignment purpose.
❑ Significant savings in power consumption and improved alignment
reliability.
❑ Simple demonstration: optical data transmission between toy train and
ground nodes
❑ NS-2 simulation components:
❑ FSO propagation models
❑ Mobile FSO antennas.
❑ Initial simulation: points to need for optimizing interactions w/ transport
and network level protocols.
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 Thanks!
Students:
Jayasri Akella, sri@networks.ecse.rpi.edu
Dr. Murat Yuksel (post-doc): yuksem@ecse.rpi.edu
Chang Liu, c.liu@ee.unimelb.edu.au
David Partyka, partyd@rpi.edu
Sujatha Sridharan

: “shiv rpi”

Ps: Online free videos of all my advanced networking classes

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 Details

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 Simulation of mobile FSO nodes continued

❑ An FTP session is kept alive between the central node and the mobile
node. For our experiments, all wired links are 100 Mbps with 2ms delays
and Drop Tail queues, while the FSO nodes are configured to only transmit
at 20 Mbps. (20Mbps is just our configuration limitation, and is not a
physical limitation as modulation speeds can be in the order of GHz in
optical bands)

❑ Initially, the experiment starts with the mobile node and one of the
stationary nodes in LOS.

❑ Soon after the session is established, the node moves around the stationary
nodes at a constant rate of speed. Routing is performed by ad hoc DSDV
routing agents and MAC is facilitated by 802.11 that is already present in
NS-2.

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 Simulation of mobile FSO nodes continued

❑ We can see that using FSO propagation model in the simulation, it is

possible to achieve connectivity through mobile FSO communication even
with a very small number of transceivers on the spherical optical antenna.

❑ The experiments were configured in such a manner that LOS is not always
present, thus showing that connectivity is reestablished when the nodes are
back in LOS. This is demonstrated by the periods of inactivity in the
utilization graphs and by the plateaus in the TCP sequence number graphs,
which is shown in the figure.

❑ The TCP sequence numbers for the other experiments also showed similar
behavior, where plateaus exist for connectivity periods.

❑ Furthermore, increase in the TCP sequence numbers imply that:

❑ All simulation components from physical layer to transport layer are setup
properly, thereby provides validity of our simulation building blocks.
❑ Transport level good-put can be achieved over a highly variant (i.e. frequent
LOS changes) FSO environment.

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