Abstract Visible wavelength light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and laser diodes (LDs) enabled optical wireless communication (OWC) is an emerging technology for realizing high-confidentiality and high-speed point-to-point (PtP), vehicle-to-vehicle, and white-lighting data access links in indoor/outdoor free-space and underwater environments. Notably, OWC facilitates users to access more transmission bandwidth and capacity with physical-layer security and electromagnetic-immunity features by utilizing unlicensed visible optical carriers bands covering from 400 to 800 THz as compared to the commonly employed radio-frequency bands. Hence, a large amount of heavy data exchanging, routing, and streaming traffics can be realized in the current wireless networks. This also reinforces the realistic fusion of optical fiber wireline, radio-frequency wireless, and visible lighting communication networks in the new big-data era. In this paper, developing progress as well as the current trend of visible LED and LD based OWC networks for PtP, white-lighting and underwater applications are overviewed in detail. The performance parameters and figures-of-merits of previously reported OWC systems are summarized for comparison and discussion. Three main scenarios including visible LED based lighting OWC, visible LD enabled PtP communication, and LD based white-light fidelity (“Li-Fi”) are individually discussed and summarized with their allowable data rate, transmission distance, and lighting color temperature and rendering index for comparison. At first, the transmission performances of LED based PtP and white-lighting OWC system with the use of novel data formats, such as pulse amplitude modulation and quadrature amplitude modulation-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, are surveyed to understand the increasing trend on transmission capacity of LED based OWC system. Owing to the limited bandwidth and data rate of LED based OWC system, the LD has gradually been regarded as a competitive alternative candidate transmitter due to their significantly broadened bandwidth and enhanced data capacity. By taking the aforementioned advantages, studies on the blue/violet LD based white-lighting OWC have recently emerged to demonstrate the substitutability of this technology. The impacts of LD based OWC technology with its state-of-the-art implementation are comprehensively discussed together with prospects for future developments. Undoubtedly, the blue/violet LDs are also a promising transmitter for underwater PtP transmission owing to its extremely low power extinction in water, which has recently emerged as the most intriguing source for undersea exploration and sensing applications.

中文翻译：

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迈向基于高速可见激光照明的光无线通信

摘要 可见波长发光二极管 (LED) 和激光二极管 (LD) 支持的光无线通信 (OWC) 是实现高机密性和高速点对点 (PtP)、车对车的新兴技术。 ，以及室内/室外自由空间和水下环境中的白光数据访问链接。值得注意的是，与常用的射频频段相比，OWC 利用覆盖 400 至 800 THz 的未授权可见光载波频段，通过物理层安全性和电磁抗扰性功能帮助用户获得更多传输带宽和容量。因此，在当前的无线网络中可以实现大量繁重的数据交换、路由和流传输。这也加强了光纤有线、射频无线、新大数据时代的可见光通信网络。在本文中，详细概述了用于 PtP、白光和水下应用的基于可见光 LED 和 LD 的 OWC 网络的发展进展和当前趋势。总结了先前报告的 OWC 系统的性能参数和品质因数，以供比较和讨论。三个主要场景包括基于可见光 LED 的照明 OWC、支持可见光 LD 的 PtP 通信和基于 LD 的白光保真度 (“Li-Fi”) 分别讨论并总结了它们允许的数据速率、传输距离、照明色温和渲染比较指标。首先，使用新型数据格式的基于 LED 的 PtP 和白光 OWC 系统的传输性能，对脉冲幅度调制和正交幅度调制-正交频分复用等进行了调查，以了解基于 LED 的 OWC 系统传输容量的增长趋势。由于基于 LED 的 OWC 系统的带宽和数据速率有限，LD 因其显着拓宽的带宽和增强的数据容量而逐渐被视为具有竞争力的替代候选发射器。利用上述优势，最近出现了对基于蓝/紫光 LD 的白光 OWC 的研究，以证明该技术的可替代性。综合讨论了基于 LD 的 OWC 技术及其最先进实施的影响以及未来发展的前景。无疑，