With the widespread adoption of mobile networks, the demand for onboard aircraft network connectivity is growing at a significant pace. However, existing solutions for this air-to-ground (ATG) communication scenario, such as satellite communication or 4G/5G ATG communication, fall short in meeting the increasing throughput demands. To address this challenge, leveraging free-space optical (FSO) technology presents a promising opportunity. FSO links have the capability to provide ultra-high throughput up to Tbps[1], offering a significant advantage over RF solutions. However, to ensure the robustness of an ATG FSO link, two key challenges need to be addressed: (i) guaranteeing high-probability link establishment, and (ii) minimizing link loss to ensure reliable communication. In this demonstration, we propose a novel FSO architecture specifically optimized for the ATG scenario. Our design incorporates a retroreflector-based pure-optical feedback mechanism and a self-adaptive tracking and pointing mechanism to tackle these two challenges respectively. To validate the feasibility of our hardware design, we have developed a prototype system and conducted a series of preliminary experiments.

IoT uplink performance is crucial for a wide variety of IoT applications such as health sensing and industrial control, which demand reliable delivery of sensor data to the cloud. However, due to the limited transmission power budget imposed on many power-constrained IoT devices, IoT uplinks are highly susceptible to cross-technology interference (CTI) caused by coexisting networks. Previous approaches to mitigating CTI have relied on MAC/PHY designs. They suffer from poor performance and limited generality in the presence of wideband CTI sources such as Wi-Fi and RF jammer, which transmit aggressively on large spectrum chunks using diverse radio technologies.