Fast millimeter wave assisted beam-steering for passive indoor optical wireless networks

In light of the extreme radio congestion, the time has come to consider the upper parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Optical beam-steered wireless communications offer great potential for future indoor short-range connectivity, due to virtually unlimited available bandwidth and lack of interference. However, such networks require fast automatic beam-steering solutions. In this letter, we propose a novel optical beam-steering approach that exploits coarse grained millimeter wave localization to significantly reduce optical beam-steering time. We formulate it as a search problem that is NP-Hard to solve optimally. Moreover, we present the MMW-OBS heuristic that efficiently solves it in real-time. Results show that MMW-OBS provides total steering times below 1 second using state of the art millimeter wave localization, which is already sufficient to support sporadically mobile devices.