A method and apparatus for improving the transmission quality of a free space optical bus between circuitry elements in high speed computing, communication and signal processing systems. Use is made of an adaptive algorithm that learns the transmission properties of the bus, and selects or adjusts transmission paths or characteristics to provide optimum bus performance. Each transmitter on the bus transmits a signal which is generally measured by all of the receivers on the bus, and the measured signals are used to generate a matrix which maps desired transmission along information links, and cross-link interference. Transmission quality is optimized by adjusting one or more characteristics associated with transmission along the bus, including emitted power, beam divergence, wavelength, beam polarization, antenna gain and antenna polar diagram of the transmitters, and power sensitivity, gain, equalizer coefficients, field of view, polarization sensitivity, antenna gain and antenna polar diagram of the receivers. Novel bus configurations are described, including use of different wavelengths for different bus functions.