FPGA implementation of a sub-400ns 6G free-space optical wireless communications transmitter

Future wireless networks are planned to service many applications with an Ultra Low-Latency (ULL) requirement. Numerous 6G systems have been proposed including more traditional electro-magnetic (EM) antenna transmissions and optical wireless communications (OWC). For extremely wide-band operation, the traditional approaches require digital pre-distortion and other processing techniques which, in turn, require more computational resources and processing times thus increasing latency. Alternatively, OWC has the potential for extremely wide bandwidths in 6G without the need for as much digital signal processing. In order to realise ULL performance, a minimum number of digital signal processing (DSP) blocks is required, as well as an optimal design of each of these. In this letter, we propose a DSP solution for ULL and peak to average power ratio (PAPR) reduction for OWC systems. Unitary checkerboard precoding - orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (UCP-OFDM) is chosen as the modulation scheme and has been implemented within a single digital block avoiding the use of standard OFDM which would otherwise require multiple digital blocks. Experimentally validated results successfully demonstrate a 2.21184 GSps wireless link at distances of up to 2m in noisy daylight settings. Bit error rates (BER) of 0 at root mean square (RMS) error vector magnitude (EVM) of 4.09% are achieved. A complete digital line-up of an OWC transmitter chain for this work contains only three core blocks and ULL of less than 400 ns.