SCOPE – In recent years, wireless communications have significantly evolved due to the advanced technology of smartphones, portable devices and the rapid growth of Internet of Things, e-Health, e-Commerce, intelligent transportation systems and social networking. Forecasted by the Cisco the wireless mobile traffic will be dominant over the data network as part of the new connected world in 2020 and the upcoming 5G and beyond wireless technologies. More recently, we have seen growing research activities in Optical Wireless Communications (OWC) as a complementary wireless technology to the more established radio frequency (RF)-based systems such as cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, in order to overcome the spectrum crunch and provide high data rates in urban environments and crowded locations. The OWC technology offering advantages such as free license, wide bandwidth, inherent security and no RFbased electromagnetic interference, which makes it very attractive for the emerging 5G wireless communications.
Nevertheless, the widespread deployment of OWC systems in the three major bands of infra-red, ultra-violet and visible light, will face a number of challenges including the weather effects (mostly for free space optical communication in outdoors), channel impairments, eye and skin safety regulations, compatibility with existing networks, mobility (mostly in outdoor environments), cost per device and volume, and device/system performance. This has led to a substantial volume of research activities both at academia and industry at a global level in order to make OWC systems a more reliable and viable wireless option as part of the future integrated networks. This research activity is supported by an exponentially growing number of publications including a number of books, dedicated technical events, PhD research studies at a global level, and funded research projects including the EU COST action IC1101 on OWC the emerging technology with over 22 member countries, EH H2020 Vision project with over 10 partners, and others.
Following the success of the first five events of:
- the 1st workshop on VLC at ICC 2015, London (UK) with 50 papers;
- the 2nd workshop at ICC 2016 in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) with 43 papers;
- the 3rd workshop, ICC 2017 in Paris (France) with 44 papers;
- the 4th workshop at ICC 2018 Kansas City (USA) with 46 papers,
and based on feedbacks received from the delegates attended the workshops and researchers working in the field of OWC, the Organising Committee of workshop has decided to organise the 5th workshop as part of ICC 2019, which will cover the entire field of OWC including the emerging visible light communications (VLC) technology.
The full-day workshop on OWC aims to bring together researchers and software and hardware developers from academia and industry, working on OWC, to present, share and discuss their latest research results. High technical quality papers will be solicited to be presented at the Workshop.
