IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Optical Wireless Technologies for 5G Communications and Beyond

Wide bandwidth and dense spatial reuse are of extreme importance for future wireless communication networks, including 5G and beyond. In particular, these properties are important to enable future wireless networks to cope with the explosive increase in the demand for high data-rate communications. Optical wireless communications (OWC) is a promising technology for achieving this goal due to the abundant reusable license-free optical spectrum. This potential of OWC attracted significant global attention both from communications and optoelectronics viewpoints, and continues to do so.