Optical Wireless Communication for the Internet of Things: Advances,
Challenges, and Opportunities
Abstract
The continuous development of the Internet of Things (IoT) calls for
innovative solutions and technologies to realize the IoT vision
efficiently. One of the rising connectivity technologies that can
potentially benefit the IoT deployment is Optical Wireless Communication
(OWC) technology. In OWC, light beams from light sources are used to
modulate information. The receiver demodulates the received light and
processes the signal. The broad unlicensed spectrum of the OWC
technology, along with its potential high bit-rate and increased
physical link security, motivated researchers to consider OWC for IoT
solutions. In this paper, we survey the existing literature related to
using OWC technology in the IoT domain. We present the background and
preliminaries of the IoT and OWC domains to understand how the OWC fits
in the IoT architecture. Then we perform a comprehensive survey of
literature related to the use of OWC technology in IoT applications. We
highlight and summarize the major papers and experiments in the
literature to provide researchers a jump-start to tap into the domain of
OWC in IoT using the systemic and detailed survey presented in this
paper.