Optical Wireless Technologies for 5G Communications and Beyond

Submission Deadline: 31 August 2017

IEEE Access invites manuscript submissions in the area of Optical Wireless Technologies for 5G Communications and Beyond.

The explosive increase in the demand for high data-rate communications has triggered the re-emergence of optical wireless communication (OWC) technologies as promising ingredients of future communication systems. The vast potential of OWC has attracted significant global attention, both from communications and optoelectronics viewpoints, and continues to do so. This potential stems from various interesting desirable properties including its wide and free spectrum and its spatial locality, leading to great advantages in terms of data-rates, spatial reuse, and more. As such, it becomes important to study this potential, and how it can solve the envisioned challenges of future wireless communications, including 5G and beyond.

To this end, the purpose of this Special Section in IEEE Access is to attract innovative research addressing the capabilities of OWC, and its existing and emerging theoretical and practical challenges. It aims to bring together theoretical as well as experimental boundary-pushing research works that improve upon the state-of-the-art, illustrate and justify the applicability of OWC as a future communication technology, and open up new research topics related to OWC. This special section will solicit top quality papers focusing on the following applications:

  • OWC for small-cell 5G heterogeneous networks and optical attocells
  • OWC for long and short range outdoors communications (free-space optical, street light-posts, optical backhauling, etc.)
  • OWC for the internet-of-things (IoT) and large sensor networks, device-to-device, machine-to-machine, and machine-to-infrastructure communications.

Here, OWC refers to general optical wireless communication including infrared (IR), ultraviolet (UV), and visible-light communications (VLC), whichever is suitable for the given application. Special attention will be given to papers reporting new results and insights along the following principal technical areas:

  • Channel modeling, modulation, coding, and equalization
  • Channel capacity analysis and diversity techniques
  • Optical MIMO, WDM, and color-frequency modulation
  • Energy efficiency and dimming issues of simultaneous illumination and communication using VLC
  • Mobility and robustness issues in optical small cells (attocells)
  • Multiuser techniques, optical CDMA, and optical OFDMA
  • Access, scheduling and interference mitigation for multiuser OWC
  • Protocols, architecture, and PHY/MAC cross-layer design for multiuser OWC
  • Multi-tier systems integrating OWC and RF for 5G and future communication systems
  • Optoelectronic transmitter and receiver design for indoors and outdoors OWC
  • Experimental demonstrations, tests, and performance characterizations of devices and components for OWC

We also highly recommend the submission of multimedia with each article as it significantly increases the visibility, downloads, and citations of articles.

Associate Editor: Muhammad Ali Imran, University of Glasgow, UK

Guest Editors:

  1. Anas Chaaban, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia
  2. Nan Chi, Fudan University, China
  3. Hany Elgala, University at Albany – State University of New York, USA
  4. Zouheir Rezki, University of Idaho, USA
  5. Majid Safari, University of Edinburgh, UK
  6. Harilaos Sandalidis, University of Thessaly, Greece

IEEE Access Editor-in-Chief: Michael Pecht, Professor and Director, CALCE, University of Maryland

Paper submission: Contact Associate Editor and submit manuscript to:
http://ieee.atyponrex.com/journal/ieee-access

For inquiries regarding this Special Section, please contact: Bora M. Onat, Managing Editor, IEEE Access (Phone: (732) 562-6036, specialsections@ieee.org)