The field of optical communication systems is moving towards the development of innovative solutions to address the challenges of non-line-of-sight (NLOS) communication and beam misalignment. Researchers are exploring the use of high-altitude platforms (HAPs) and optical intelligent reflecting surfaces (OIRS) to improve connectivity in urban environments. Additionally, there is a focus on analyzing and mitigating the effects of beam misalignment and clipping distortion in free-space optical (FSO) communication systems.

Noteworthy papers include:

• One that proposes a system combining HAPs and OIRS to address LOS challenges, deriving accurate approximations for key channel impairments and obtaining closed-form expressions for performance metrics.
• Another that investigates the impact of beam misalignment on inter-satellite FSO communication, introducing a truncated CDF formulation to efficiently compute outage probabilities.
• A paper that studies the performance of NOMA-assisted optical OFDM ISAC systems with clipping distortion, proposing a novel transmitter architecture and analyzing the effects of power allocation and clipping distortion on communication and sensing performance.