Comparative Test of Novel Fluorescent Optical Antennas for LED- and Laser-Based Optical Wireless Communications

Fluorescent Concentrators (FCs) are set to revolutionize Optical Wireless Communications (OWC), offering significant advantages over traditional receivers, such as large Field of View (FoV) and enhanced optical gain (OG). In this study, three different Optical Antennas are presented and evaluated as OWC receivers, exploiting FCs incorporating different fluorophores. The performances of DQ1 and Lumogen Red 305F (LR305), and a newly synthesized fluorophore (H2) are comparatively tested for solar energy harvesting, never proposed before for OWC. The devices are tested in high bit rate, laser-based OWC configuration, and for indoor LED-based Visible Light Communication (VLC) by presenting a realistic indoor VLC transmitter-receiver (TX-RX) system embedding high-power white LEDs as transmitter. The results demonstrate that all the proposed OAs exhibit greater angular stability than traditional detectors, potentially offering greater resilience to misalignment and beam wandering effects, particularly relevant also in Free Space Optical (FSO) configurations. Furthermore, the intrinsic properties of H2 and LR305 make them particularly suited for white-light VLC applications. Based on a thorough experimental characterization, the work is the first to propose and evaluate in detail the performance of various new OAs, depending on the specific application, highlighting the efficiency of such devices across various OWC fields.