Optical wireless communications for airport surface operations: Opportunities and challenges

Application of optical wireless communication (OWC) for vehicular communications has witnessed tremendous progress and development during the last decade. In OWC vehicular links, lights from vehicles and road infrastructure (e.g., lighting and signages) are used to establish vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) links to exchange information for efficient and safer road operation. In this paper, we motivate the research of using OWC to facilitate the Data Communications (Data Comm) capability of the NextGen framework by investigating the potential of using OWC during ground operations. We discuss the opportunities and advantages of using OWC in airports as well the challenges. We also present and discuss different possible solutions for such challenges.