Wireless Optical Communications for Industrial Environments: Challenges and Opportunities

Industrial settings, such as manufacturing floors, warehouses, refineries, and process plants, are characterized by harsh environmental conditions (e.g., heavy machinery vibrations, metal obstructions, dust, and varying levels of ambient light) as well as stringent requirements for reliability, latency, and electromagnetic compatibility. Traditional radio-frequency (RF) wireless links often suffer from interference, spectrum scarcity, and safety constraints in such environments. Over the past decade, wireless optical communications (WOC) techniques, including visible light communication (VLC), infrared (IR) links, and optical camera communication (OCC), have emerged as promising alternatives or complements to RF-based solutions. WOC leverages existing lighting infrastructures (e.g., LED luminaires) or dedicated optical transceivers to transmit data using modulated light, thereby offering benefits such as inherent immunity to electromagnetic interference (EMI), unlicensed spectrum, and fine-grained spatial confinement of beams.

Despite these advantages, deploying WOC in real-world industrial scenarios pose several challenges. Ambient light noise, particulate matter and reflections from metallic surfaces can degrade signal to noise ratio and increase bit-error rates. As well as this, Automated guided vehicles, robotic arms, and moving human operators introduce constantly changing link geometries, requiring adaptive beam-steering and robust tracking algorithms. Finally, seamless coexistence and handover between WOC and legacy RF/PLC networks is essential to support deterministic Quality of Service for time-critical control loops.

This Research Topic aims to gather the latest advances in modeling, design, prototyping, and validation of WOC systems tailored to the demands of industrial environments, with a view toward enhancing throughput, reliability, and energy efficiency in Industry 4.0 contexts.

This Research Topic highly welcomes original research articles, review manuscripts and methods articles covering, but not restricted to:
- Statistical models for optical propagation in the presence of dust, smoke, and metallic reflections.
- Ambient light cancellation techniques and noise-resilient modulation (e.g., M-PPM, OFDM-based VLC).
- Integration of WOC with RF (Wi-Fi, 5G/6G) or PLC for seamless handover and load balancing.
- Protocol design for deterministic latency in control loops (e.g., TSN, time-slotted optical MAC).
- Techniques for dynamic bandwidth allocation among multiple optical links in a confined factory floor.
- Prototype demonstrations in real or emulated industrial testbeds
- Performance comparisons under realistic traffic patterns (machine-to-machine, human-machine interfaces).

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Original Research
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Wireless Optical Communication, Visible Light Communication, Optical Camera Communication, RF/Wireless Integration, Spatial Confined Communications

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.