Recent Developments in Optical Wireless Communications using Infrared and Visible Light

For future short-range applications, optical wireless communications present a viable and promising supplemental technology to radio wireless systems. This contribution presents a review of infrared and visible light optical wireless indoor communications, including basics, state of the art, challenges and prospects. Advanced approaches based on diversity techniques and adaptive signal processing show potential to achieve both high spatial coverage and high bit rates of more than 100 Mb/s.