Patent 9712273 was granted and assigned to ZTE on July, 2017 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Optical signals with different orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes are used to multiplex data for different receiver together or a light signal. The OAM based multiplexing may be used in addition to other multiplexing schemes such as time division multiplexing, polarization multiplexing and so on. Capacity of existing optical network infrastructure can be increased significantly using OAM modulation, and data communication can be secured at the same time.