Visible Light Communication (VLC) has gained popularity in research and business in the last decade. This technology aims to combine lighting and communication into a single device. For now, this technology has been thoroughly studied for an indoor environment, but it is sufficiently mature nowadays to consider its outdoor-environment potentials. The key outdoor challenges are the weather variabilities and smoke particles in cities due to pollution or fires. The aim of this is the study and quantification of the weather and smoke particles’ impact on a short-range optical communication thanks to a simulator. This article’s novelty is the inclusion of the effects of smoke in a short-range outdoor VLC system channel model. This smoke model, which comes from the fire engineering field, states that smoke attenuation is independent of the wavelength, starting from high visibility to 5 m. The visibility represents the distance up to which an object can be distinguished against the background. The effects of fog and smoke are studied in the case of two outdoor VLC scenarios. Smoke and fog models have analogous equations to express the optical attenuation they induce, using the visibility concept. Taking into account the actual light-emitting diode (LED) lamp radiation pattern, the simulator computes the power at the receiver side and the channel attenuation coefficients for a given fog or/and smoke outdoor setting. The main result drawn in this paper is that the channel attenuation levels due to fog and smoke are both in the same order of magnitude, starting from the visibility of about 1 km. The attenuation induced by fog is higher under this threshold of 1 km.

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is the family of telecommunication technologies that uses the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum to send data. This technology mainly uses Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) to simultaneously illuminate and send data. Furthermore, thanks to the adoption of LED lighting by cities and for car lights, VLC is about to bring a lot of interconnectivity possibilities among devices in the city, making this latter smarter. Even though outdoor VLC is still in the research phase, the main promising applications foreseen by this technology are urban Li-Fi (Light Fidelity), VLC-IoT (Internet of Things) and V2X (Vehicle to Vehicle or Vehicle to Infrastructure). VLC-IoT is envisioned as a streetlight communicating with the surrounding urban furniture or a streetlight sending location-based content to a visitor located under its light beam. V2X is intended to communicate with each other and/or with the street infrastructure. In this way, VLC could reply to the lack of connectivity in some places and relieve the RF spectrum. This work outlines and surveys the current state of Visible Light Communication in outdoor environments, its main challenges, the most promising outdoor applications and the still ongoing standardisation efforts in the context of Smart Cities.

With the growth in number and diversity of devices using RF (Radio Frequency) technologies, e.g. in the frame of IoT (Internet of Things), the available RF spectrum is getting overcrowded with these newcomers. As it is a limited and regulated resource, alternative solutions need to be found to avoid a possible shortage of wireless frequencies. Among the new potential technologies, Optical Wireless Communication (OWC), the family of communication techniques that uses visible, infrared or UV spectra to transmit data, is gaining popularity. Applications of OWC technologies are, for now, related to indoor communications. Nevertheless, outdoor OWC applications are also promising, particularly in the context of smart cities with applications such as outdoor urban Li-Fi (Light Fidelity) or IoT optical interconnections with urban furniture. The aim of this paper is to review the current status of outdoor OWC systems and their standardization, as well as identify their potential and the challenges they face with regard to the deployment of Smart Cities.

In the dynamic landscape of 6G and smart cities, visible light communication (VLC) assumes critical significance for Internet of Things (IoT) applications spanning diverse sectors. The escalating demand for bandwidth and data underscores the need for innovative solutions, positioning VLC as a complementary technology within the electromagnetic spectrum. This paper focuses on the relevance of VLC in the 6G paradigm, shedding light on its applicability across smart cities and industries. The paper highlights the growing efficiency of lighting LEDs in infrastructure, facilitating the seamless integration of VLC. The study then emphasizes VLC’s robustness in outdoor settings, demonstrating effective communication up to 10 m. This resilience positions VLC as a key player in addressing the very last meter of wireless communication, offering a seamless solution for IoT connectivity. By introducing a freely available open-source simulator combined with an alternative waveform, UFMC, the study empowers researchers to dimension applications effectively, showcasing VLC’s potential to improve wireless communication in the evolving landscape of 6G and smart cities.

Estimating the optical power distribution in a room in order to assess the performance of a visible light communication (VLC) system is nothing new. It can be estimated using a Monte Carlo optical ray tracing algorithm that sums the contribution of each ray on the reception plane. For now, research has focused on rectangular parallelepipedic rooms with single-textured walls, when studying indoor applications. This article presents a new open-source simulator that answers the case of more complex rooms by analysing them using a 3D STL (stereolithography) model. This paper describes this new tool in detail, with the material used, the software architecture, the ray tracing algorithm, and validates it against the literature and presents new use cases. To the best of our knowledge, this simulator is the only free and open-source ray tracing analysis for complex 3D rooms for VLC research. In particular, this simulator is capable of studying any room shape, such as an octagon or an L-shape. The user has the opportunity to control the number of emitters, their orientation, and especially the number of rays emitted and reflected. The final results are detailed heat maps, enabling the visualization of the optical power distribution across any 3D room. This tool is innovative both visually (using 3D models) and mathematically (estimating the coverage of a VLC system).

In the dynamic landscape of 6G and smart cities, Visible Light Communication (VLC) assumes critical significance for IoT (Internet of Things) applications spanning diverse sectors. The escalating demand for bandwidth and data underscores the need for innovative solutions, positioning VLC as a complementary technology within the electromagnetic spectrum. This paper focuses on the relevance of VLC in the 6G paradigm, shedding light on its applicability across smart cities and industries. The paper highlights the growing efficiency of lighting LEDs in infrastructure, facilitating the seamless integration of VLC. The study then emphasizes VLC’s robustness in outdoor settings, demonstrating effective communication up to 10 meters. This resilience positions VLC as a key player in addressing the very last meter of wireless communication, offering a seamless solution for IoT connectivity. By introducing an a freely available open-source simulator combined to an alternative waveform, UFMC, the study empowers researchers to dimension applications effectively, showcasing VLC’s potential to improve wireless communication in the evolving landscape of 6G and smart cities.