Single-Photon Counting Receivers for Optical Wireless Communications in Future 6G Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of single-photon counting receivers in optical wireless communication systems to address low received power issues, aiming to enhance 6G network performance.

Contribution

It provides an overview of SPC-based OWC systems, identifies key performance challenges, and proposes a framework for performance improvement in future 6G networks.

Findings

SPC receivers can mitigate outage issues in OWC.

Performance enhancement frameworks are proposed.

Open research problems are identified for future work.

Abstract

Optical wireless communication (OWC) offers several complementary advantages to radio-frequency wireless networks such as its massive available spectrum; hence, it is widely anticipated that OWC will assume a pivotal role in the forthcoming sixth generation wireless communication networks. Although significant progress has been achieved in OWC over the past decades, the outage induced by occasionally low received optical power continues to pose a key limiting factor for its deployment. In this work, we discuss the potential role of single-photon counting (SPC) receivers as a promising solution to overcome this limitation. We present an overview of the applications of SPC-based OWC systems in 6G networks, introduce their major performance-limiting factors, propose a performance enhancement framework to tackle these issues, and identify critical areas of open problems for future research.