on Wireless Communications and Networking Optical Wireless Communications

This is a special issue published in volume 2005 of " EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking. " All articles are open access articles distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Seamless integration of the technology into products which are used in our daily life, products we rely on for necessary common daily tasks, is a trademark of a mature and successful technology. It is not often that we think of optical wireless communications (OWC) with indoor optical links within remote control units as invisible extensions to our hands used to control our daily home entertainment and other appliances while we sit and relax comfortably in our settee. OWC is a relative newcomer ubiquitous technology entering our homes in a similar manner as other hugely successful and more mature technologies such as motors and microprocessors. There is wide diversity in the field of OWC applications which span from very short-range (mm range) optical interconnects within integrated circuits for clock distribution, for example, to high-volume ubiquitous consumer electronic products, to outdoor intrabuilding links of a few-kilometre range, and to high-performance unique links of extreme-range (45000 km) intersatellite links. Prior to the development of fibre optics as the most successful optical waveguide, wireless point-to-point communications using optical pipes with lenses were extensively being studied at Bell Laboratories. The subsequent development and growth of low-cost fibre optic components have further facilitated OWC to complement fibre-optic links. OWC are in use today in many diverse applications and are tailored to offer low-and very-high-speed wireless links cost effectively. In common with other technologies within systems, their growth depends on the user problems it successfully solves, techno-economic issues, and developments/breakthroughs in constituent component technologies. Possible OWC successful applications are numerous, spanning from payment systems, TV remote controls, and infrared data association (IrDA) ports for watches, printers, laptops, and mobile phones to last-mile broadband access, easy-to-setup TV broadcasting links, intersatellite links, and deep-space links. For high-volume consumer applications, the requirements and issues are for low-cost, short-range, high-dynamic range links and robustness to ambient noise, interference, and availability of standards to allow interoperability between products. The computer industry first pioneered through the IrDA standards for short-range optical wireless data links for computers. The first IrDA standard actually used technology which evolved from the success of the early HP pro-grammable calculators. …