The thesis introduces the concept of the Photonic Active Integrated Antenna (PhAIA) where optical devices are integrated with planar antennas to produce very compact, low cost modules. PhAIAs are applied to the Radio-over-Fibre application area which is a promising approach to improve the coverage of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Results show that our systems can operate within a room scale without the use of amplification and at much larger wireless ranges with the use of integrated amplifiers chips. Initially, laboratory based setups are developed which prove the system concept and this is followed by the development of fully portable systems which have under gone field trials using live WiFi access points. Initially unamplified systems are developed to understand the fundamental properties of the radio-over-fibre system and impedance matching of the optical devices directly to the antennas has been implemented- To further improve the impedance matching, lossless matching circuits are implemented, in particular for the photodiode which has a large capacitive part to its input impedance. Following this, a fully modular system was developed using packaged lasers and photodiodes which resulted a fully portable. rugged system suitable for a number of commercial applications. Finally the concept of Power-over-Fibre, where by electrical energy is transferred to a remote location via an optical fibre, is used to power the remote PhAIA module. In this case simultaneous transmission of WLAN data and energy was used for the first time.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:504230 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Sittakul, Vitawat |
| Publisher | University of Bristol |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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