Amuthan Rajendiran, Inbarani Vijaakumar, 2026. "IRS-Aided Optical Wireless Networks Sum-Rate Optimization Strategies", International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering Research (IJECER) 1(1): 38-56.

As data-centric applications, smart environments, Internet of Things ecosystems and next-gen wireless communication systems proliferate rapidly, the need for high-capacity and energy-efficient telecommunication technologies becomes critical. Optical Wireless Communication (OWC) has been an attractive solution for the above issues due to its unlicensed spectrum availability, high free space bandwidth, improved security and insensitiveness to electromagnetic interference. Visible Light Communication (VLC), Light Fidelity (LiFi) and Free Space Optical (FSO) communication technologies provide solutions as promising supplements to future communication infrastructures. Optical wireless networks promise many major advantages, but several main challenges remain like limited coverage, blockage sensitivities, line of sight alignment and non-line-of-sight degradation. These constraints trigger the search for new technologies that can enhance signal propagation and increase the overall throughput of the network.Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRSs) are a recently emerging technology that can reshape wireless propagation environments in a flexible and programmable way. IRS enables dynamic restructuring of communication channels that can dynamically adjust the reflection characteristics of incident optical signals to achieve better signal quality, coverage, and overall network efficiency. Using IRS with optical wireless communication systems reformulates the propagation scenario and provides new directions to conquer these limitations while achieving higher data rates with better quality of experience. Network sum-rate, one of the most important performance metric, has recently attracted significant interest as it reflects the overall achievable data rate by all users in the network. Thus, maximizing the sum-rate is crucial in order to achieve efficient use of available communication resources.
Research on Sum-Rate optimization strategies for IRS-aided optical wireless network The paper reviews the basics of optical wireless communication and intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-related technologies, surveys channel modeling for IRS-assisted optical links, and establishes optimization strategies towards maximizing network throughput. In order to improve the communication performance, various beamforming techniques, phase-shift optimization methods and power allocation and resource management algorithms are examined. The study also explores optimization methods driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence, that are able to dynamically adjust IRS configurations in line with evolving network states.Through performance evaluation, we show that IRS-assisted optical wireless networks can improve the sum-rate, coverage, spectral efficiency and energy efficiency of conventional optical communication systems significantly. Intelligent optimization algorithms can efficiently improve the signal propagation and utilization of resources by reducing interference and blockage effects. The results show that IRS technology combined with high-order optimization approaches has the potential to become the backbone of future large-scale optical wireless communication networks.

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