Outdoor Performance Comparison of Optical Wireless and Millimeter Wave

In this paper a point-to-point optical wireless link based on infrared LEDs is presented and compared with a 60 GHz millimeter wave radio link in a 100 m outdoor deployment. Results from the ongoing long-term measurement are presented and the influences of several bad weather events are discussed for the both links. High data rates of up to 500 Mbps and interruption free data transmission are shown for the optical link, indicating a cost effective alternative to common radio technologies for small cell backhauling. The potential to achieve higher data rates, by exploiting the overall available bandwidth, is shown, thereby also enabling front- and backhauling in future 5G networks.