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This review paper discusses the complete evolution of free-space optical (FSO) communication, also known as unguided optical communication (UOC) technologies, all the way back to ancient man’s fire to today’s machine-learning-supported UOC systems. The principles, significance, and developments that have happened over the past several decades, as well as installation methodologies, technological limitations, and today’s challenges of UOCs are presented. All the subsets of UOC: FSO communication, underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC), and visible light communication (VLC), with their technology/system developments, potential applications, and limitations are reviewed. The state-of-the-art developments/achievements in (i) FSO channel effects and their mitigation techniques; (ii) radio-over-FSO techniques; (iii) wavelength division multiplexing and sub-carrier multiplexing techniques; (iv) FSO for worldwide interoperability for microwave access applications; (v) space optical satellite communication (SOSC); (vi) UWOC; (vii) photoacoustic communication (PAC); (viii) light-fidelity; (ix) VLC; (x) vehicular VLC (V2LC); and (xi) optical camera communication are reviewed. In addition, the current developments on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (to improve the performance of UOC systems), energy harvesting (for the effective utilization of UOC channels), and near-future communication network scenarios (mandatory for secured broadband digital links) are covered. Finally, in brief, to achieve the full potential of UOC systems, challenges that require immediate research attention are summarized.

This paper investigates the use of organic polymer light emitting diodes (PLEDs) for the use in visible light communications (VLC). We prepared blue and green emitting PLEDs using commercial light-emitting polymers, and then characterised the device emission (spectrum and power), and extracted their circuit parameters for their electrical equivalent model for driving with small signals. In addition, we characterised the bandwidth (oldsymbol{B-{mod}}) of the devices over a period of continuous driving (∼ 4 h) and found that for the blue PLEDs the oldsymbol{B-{mod}} decreased from an initial 750 kHz to a steady state of ∼250 kHz. The green-emitting devices were found to benefit from an extended oldsymbol{B-{mod}} of ∼1.5 MHz at the beginning of the test, which then stabilised to ∼850 kHz. Furthermore, with the addition of a first order RC filter we show that, the steady state oldsymbol{B-{mod}} of the blue PLED cane be increased by a factor of ∼3, thus allowing > 1 Mbps non-return to zero on-off keying (NRZ OOK) data transmission in a complete VLC system.

In this article, we experimentally demonstrate a novel expanded nonorthogonal multiband super-Nyquist carrier-less amplitude and phase (m-ESCAP) modulation for bandlimited organic visible light communication (VLC) systems. The proposed scheme has the same bandwidth requirement as the conventional m-CAP while breaking the orthogonality between subcarriers by purposely overlapping them. We compare m-ESCAP with the conventional m-CAP and a compressed nonorthogonal version of m-CAP (m-SCAP) in terms of measured bit error rate (BER) performance, bit rates, and spectral efficiencies. We show that the m-ESCAP system offers improvement in the bit rate of ∼10% and 20% compared to the m-CAP and m-SCAP, respectively, and in the spectral efficiency of ∼20% compared to m-CAP. These gains are achieved at the cost of increased BER, which, however, remains below the 7% forward error correction limit.

In this paper we experimentally demonstrate, for the first time, staggered carrier-less amplitude and phase (sCAP) modulation for visible light communication systems based on polymer light-emitting diodes emitting at ∼639 nm. The key advantage offered by sCAP in comparison to conventional multiband CAP is its full use of the available spectrum. In this work, we compare sCAP, which utilises four orthogonal filters to generate the signal, with a conventional 4-band multi-CAP system and on-off keying (OOK). We transmit each modulation format with equal energy and present a record un-coded transmission speed of ∼6 Mb/s. This represents gains of 25% and 65% over the achievable rate using 4-CAP and OOK, respectively.

Visible light communication systems often suffer from high frequency attenuation when transmitting out-of-band. This effect has been ameliorated by multi-band modulations such as multi-band carrier-less amplitude and phase (m-CAP), which minimises the effect of decreased high frequency magnitude and maximises signal-to-noise ratio-per-sub-band. On the other hand, in the pass-band region, super-Nyquist CAP (SCAP) can offer throughput improvements with no additional complexity at the receiver, at the cost of bit error rate. We propose, for the first time, a new hybrid SCAP modulation format that takes advantageous of both SCAP (i.e. overlapped sub-bands within the modulation bandwidth) and conventional m-CAP (orthogonally spaced bands outside the modulation bandwidth) while maintaining isolation between noise sources. We show higher baud rates within the passband region whilst supporting out-of-band transmission at lower error vector magnitudes.

We investigate, for the first time, the effect of signal clipping on multi-band carrier-less amplitude and phase (m-CAP) modulation in visible light communications based on PLEDs. We experimentally demonstrate a Q-factor improvement up to ~2.25 dB can be obtained with a clipping level of 50%.