Revolutionizing Optical Wireless Communications via Smart Optics

The heterogeneity of optical wireless networks (OWNs) has expanded over decades in terms services, node densities, mobility requirements, bandwidth needs, responsiveness, and physical device profile. Consequently, incorporating dynamic reconfigurability into future OWNs can satisfy their diverse realm objectives. Towards this end, we provide our vision for the potential gains integrating tunable elements reflected energy consumption reduction, coverage customization, data transfer rate boosting, highly accommodating multiple access schemes, enhancing layer security, supporting simultaneous interference reduction. Finally, speculate a roadmap research directions optics aided associated challenges with deployment operation.