Modular Polarization-Engineered Optical Phased Arrays for Optical Wireless Indoor Networks

The growing passion for indoor optical wireless networks reflects their immense capability to deliver consistent high-quality data connectivity across diverse indoor environments. This study examines how polarization can be engineered to enhance near-field beam focusing in optical wireless indoor networks using a modular clustered optical phased array aperture. The aperture follows a ceiling-mounted phased array embedded within a phased array layout, associating planar clusters of dipole nano-emitters, supported by a dual-carrier architecture for grating lobe mitigation. We introduce a polarization-adaptive synthesis strategy that determines the cluster-level emitter polarization to replicate any desired polarization at the focal spot. The optimization model accommodates both unconstrained and constrained modes, enabling electric (E)-field matching from linear to general elliptical receiver states. Moreover, we analyze how quantization can be applied to these optimized orientations and how it affects the final performance. To learn the benefits of polarization orthogonality in a multi-receiver environment, we extend the aperture to simultaneously manage multiple focused beams via sub-cluster segmentation. At this level, we apply two polarization control strategies: continuous-domain polarization optimization and binary polarization assignment to match user-specific polarization states and suppress inter-user interference. Numerical estimates of per-receiver signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), E-field patterns, beam characteristics, and mean SINR trends with increasing user availability confirm the superior performance of the proposed techniques over systems that do not consider polarization. Under realistic system- and hardware-level constraints, our results deepen understanding of polarization-engineered modular optical phased arrays and demonstrate their potential for efficient and secure next-generation indoor networks.