The design of an optical wireless network based landing and take-off assistance system

In this paper, we propose a landing and a take-off assistance network architecture based on optical wireless technologies combining visible light communication (VLC) and free space optics (FSO). The network is composed of LED sensors that are used to collect information about the state of the runway and relay it using VLC communication to two gateways that will recover the sensed information and transmit it to the approaching aircraft. In addition, we investigate the deployment of the LEDs at the airstrip borders and we study wavelength assignment using WDM and graph coloring to reduce interference. Finally, we evaluate the communication performances of the proposed system in terms of transmission delay and bit error rate for both FSO and VLC links and we show its feasibility when specific characteristics of the optical components are satisfied.