Advancements in Optical Wireless Communication (OWC)

Dear Colleagues,

In the past decades, we have all witnessed a significantly growing interest in the development of optical wireless communication (OWC) technologies for a wide range of wireless application scenarios with extremely high-speed demands and electromagnetic-unfriendly environments. However, OWC has also faced many challenges, such as limited bandwidth and signal reception range of device and high sensitivity of transceiver alignment. With the state-of-the-art hardware devices and signal processing technologies, along with advanced ideas and concepts, OWC is experiencing a revolutionary development with new paradigms of researching, from point-to-point communication to networking, from single receiver to dense array detector, from single-frequency to broad-spectrum fusion, from stationary to moving, and from locating/communicating only to integrated sensing and communication. Through overviewing the advancements of OWC, we hope all of these emerging techniques can make OWC a strong candidate for use in the next-generation wireless communication network.

This Special Issue aims to provide an overview of the advancements of OWC and gather high-quality papers to find new paradigms of research and application in OWC.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Modulation, coding, and detecting in OWC;
• Advanced optical device-based OWC system;
• Breakthroughs of information theory and signal processing technology in OWC;
• Key technologies in optical wireless scattering communication/underwater optical wireless communications/free space optics/Li-Fi;
• Wideband signal processing in OWC;
• Integrated sensing and communication in OWC;
• High-speed/efficiency MIMO OWC system;
• Applications and theories of optical reconfigurable intelligent surface;
• Learning-based algorithms and technologies in OWC;
• Multiple access and networking technologies in OWC/UOWC/OWSC;
• Physical layer security in OWC;
• Novel acquisition, pointing, and tracking techniques in OWC;
• Single-photon detector-based OWC;
• Ultra-dense detector array integration and readout circuit design.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Beiyuan Liu
Dr. Weijie Liu
Dr. Jie Lian
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Photonics is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• optical wireless communications
• advanced optical devices
• wideband OWC
• underwater OWC
• integrated sensing and communication
• MIMO OWC
• learning-based OWC
• multiple access and networking
• ultra-dense detector array