The first International Workshop on Optical Wireless Communications (IWOW) was held on October 22nd at the Institute of Communication, Information and Perception Technologies (TeCIP Institute) of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. The workshop was sponsored by the IEEE and by the COST Opticwise. IWOW attracted worldwide experts in optical wireless (OW) communications, to present and discuss the latest research results related to this technology, which allows communication using pulses of light transmitted through the free space. OW technology can be applied in different fields of application, and it attracting renewed interest thanks to the recent development of low- cost light emitting diodes (LEDs) for illumination applications: LEDs indeed can allows to exploit the synergy between illumination and wide band data transmission in indoor applications replacing or combining with the WiFi networks. Also the automotive industry can take advantage of the presence of the LEDs in the headlights to implement vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication for safety critical protocol, as a part of the intelligent transport system. Others field of applications for optical wireless include the outdoor free space data transmission for local area network, the satellite-satellite transmission and satellite- ground station transmission and submarine communications. IWOW2012 was jointly organized by the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and the National Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT).

Ernesto Ciaramella, of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna ,was the coordinator of the technical and organizational committees.

During the workshop, 21 oral paper were presented to around 70 attendees. The IWOW proceeding can be found at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.js p?punumber=6335568