Optical Wireless Communication for the Internet of Things: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities

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.