Optical wireless communication (OWC) offers several complementary advantages to radio-frequency (RF) 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 (6G) 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 provide an overview of the state-of-the-art of OWC systems utilizing SPC receivers and identify several critical areas of open problems that warrant further research in the future.

翻译：光无线通信（OWC）相较于射频（RF）无线网络具有若干互补优势，例如其可利用的庞大频谱资源；因此，普遍预期OWC将在即将到来的第六代（6G）无线通信网络中发挥关键作用。尽管过去数十年间OWC已取得显著进展，但由偶发性接收光功率过低所导致的通信中断仍是制约其部署的关键因素。本文探讨了单光子计数（SPC）接收器作为克服该限制的潜在解决方案，概述了采用SPC接收器的OWC系统的最新研究进展，并指出了未来需进一步研究的若干关键开放性问题领域。