Optical wireless communication in atmosphere and underwater : statistical models, improvement techniques, and recent applications

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Ata, Yalçın and Al-Sallami, Farah Mahdi and Gökçe, Muhsin Caner and Vegni, Anna Maria and Rajbhandari, Sujan and Baykal, Yahya (2025) Optical wireless communication in atmosphere and underwater : statistical models, improvement techniques, and recent applications. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 28. pp. 4248-4284. ISSN 1553-877X (https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2025.3649735)

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Abstract

Optical Wireless Communication Systems (OWCSs) are becoming more popular each day, especially after numerous mobile applications are being employed within the concept of Internet of Things (IoT). OWCSs are largely used in both terrestrial and non-terrestrial environments, like underwater, air, and space scenarios. Due to the large applicability of OWCS, it represents one of the main candidate technologies for the future 6G wireless communication systems. Naturally, this market trend forces the system designers to reach the best performance in their designs, as well as optimize the cost. In this survey paper, we intend to provide information to the researchers working in this field on the statistical models adopted in OWCS, the methods and techniques used to improve their performances, mainly in outdoor environment like air, space, and underwater. In this respect, the background on theoretical aspects of OWCS, together with their benefits, limitations and challenges are presented. Performance improvement techniques employed in OWCSs, such as power increase, partial coherence, beamforming, aperture averaging, spatial diversity, and intelligent reflecting surfaces, are also introduced. Finally, we discuss the open challenges that researchers are still facing, together with future directions on next steps for a large-scale adoption of OWCS.

ORCID iDs

Ata, Yalçın, Al-Sallami, Farah Mahdi, Gökçe, Muhsin Caner, Vegni, Anna Maria, Rajbhandari, Sujan ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8742-118X and Baykal, Yahya;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)