Advanced Applications in Wireless Optical Communications

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, we have witnessed a staggering growth of mobile data traffic due to the widespread use of wirelessly connected mobile devices. Due to the nearly exhausted radio frequency (RF) spectrum resource, it becomes challenging to support the ever-increasing mobile data traffic using conventional RF technology. As an emerging technology, optical wireless communications (OWC) have attracted tremendous attention lately, due to its inherent advantages such as license-free spectrum, large capacity, high security, no electromagnetic interference, etc. OWC can be implemented by using various wavelength regions including infrared (IR), visible light (VL) and ultraviolet (UV), and can be applied in various scenarios including indoor, outdoor and underwater environments. Nevertheless, the massive deployment of OWC systems faces several key challenges such as high transmission rate, low energy consumption, low latency, smooth handover, blocking and mobility, and flexible/robust system design.

The present Special Issue aims to attract contributions in all areas of OWC and publish high-quality research articles as well as review articles that seek to address the challenges of OWC systems, and in particular, that provide distinctive applications for future deployments.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Novel electrical or photonic devices and components;
• Advanced modulation, coding, equalization and detection;
• Multiple-input multiple-output transmission;
• Multiple access and multi-user scheduling;
• Multi-cell/cellular network design and interference mitigation;
• Channel modelling and characterization;
• Transceiver nonlinearity compensation;
• Resource allocation and management;
• Hybrid and duplex system design;
• Privacy and security enhancement;
• Energy-efficient and cost-effective OWC;
• Artificial intelligence/machine learning-enhanced OWC;
• Visible light communication (VLC) using illumination LEDs;
• Co-design of communication and illumination control in VLC;
• LiFi architecture;
• VLC-based positioning and navigation;
• VLC-based ranging, detecting and sensing;
• Underwater optical wireless communications (OWC);
• Vehicular OWC;
• Optical camera communications (OCC);
• Application of OWC for data center.

Dr. Xiong Deng
Dr. Chen Chen
Dr. Imran Shafique Ansari
Guest Editors

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