Optical Wireless Communication–Recent Progresses and Future Perspectives

The tutorial covers the recent progresses and future perspectives on optical-wireless-communication (OWC) technology, from devices, systems to applications. Shorter-reach OWC systems, including visible-light-communication (VLC), optical-camera-communication (OCC) and visible-light-communication (VLP) will be discussed. Then, transmission in issues in longer-reach Infrared-based-communication (IRC) systems will be presented. These issues include atmospheric attenuation, optical beam divergence, pointing error, and atmospheric turbulence. Active alignment is used to mitigate the pointing error issues. These include mechanical-based systems, e.g. fast steering mirror (FSM); solid-state-based systems; and liquid-crystal (LC) based systems, e.g. spatial light modulator (SLM). Solid-state-based systems can be further classified into optical-phased-array (OPA), focal-plane-array (FPA) and dispersive grating approaches. LC-based system using SLM can be used for optical beam steering and beam division. Different integrated devices will be discussed for OWC applications, e.g. optical beam steering and atmospheric turbulence mitigation.