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.

翻译：光无线通信（OWC）凭借其巨大的可用频谱等优势，为射频无线网络提供了多项互补性优势，因此被广泛预期将在即将到来的第六代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，但偶发性接收光功率不足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）接收机作为突破该限制的潜在解决方案的作用。我们系统阐述了基于SPC的OWC系统在6G网络中的应用场景，分析了其主要性能制约因素，提出了应对这些挑战的性能增强框架，并指出了未来研究中亟待解决的关键开放性问题。