Challenges in optical wireless communication networks

Abstract

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) have continually evolved during the last few decades to meet the ever-growing user demands. However, popular radio frequency technologies such as Wi-Fi are now experiencing a spectrum crunch due to a multitude of bandwidth hungry applications and limited bandwidth available in the sub-6 GHz bands. Therefore, a number of complementary technologies such as 60 GHz Wi-Fi, visible light communication and optical wireless communication have emerged to build high capacity WLANs in indoor spaces. Amongst these emerging WLAN technologies, optical wireless communication, operating in the infrared range, is becoming popular as it has access to virtually unlimited ..