Indoor Optical Wireless Systems: Design Challenges, Mitigating Techniques and future Prospects

The need for easy, reliable and fast connectivity is a growing requirement of today's short-range indoor communication systems, such as wireless local area networks (LANs). The requirement is for a communication medium that has high speed, low cost, and low power consumption. Optical wireless (Infrared) and radio are both viable solutions, but the promise of high unregulated bandwidth at a low cost makes optical wireless an attractive technical alternative. The goal of optical wireless system designers is to achieve reliable wireless connectivity between any devices in a network. This paper reviews the research efforts to date in the field of indoor optical wireless communications and identifies the technical obstacles and limitations of infrared (IR) medium. The methods of mitigating the inherent problems associated with the medium have also been discussed.

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