In Light and In Darkness, In Motion and In Stillness

In Light and In Darkness, In Motion and In Stillness: A Reliable and Adaptive Receiver for the Internet of Lights

Wang, Q. (TU Delft Embedded Systems)
Giustiniano, Domenico (IMDEA Networks Institute)
Zuniga, Marco (TU Delft Embedded Systems)

2018

LEDs in our buildings, vehicles, and consumer products are rapidly gaining visible light communication capabilities. LED links however are notorious for being unreliable: shadowing, blockage, mobility, external light, all of these issues can disrupt the connectivity easily. Therefore, unless a reliable and cost-efficient data link layer is designed, VLC will be confined to niche applications. In this paper, we reveal a reason for unreliable VLC: a single type of photodetector at the receiver cannot establish a reliable link. We show that the photodetectors with complementary properties, in terms of optical spectral response and field-of-view, are necessary to handle the wide dynamic range of optical noise (such as the sun and other unwanted light sources) and mobility of users. Motivated by our experimental observations, we design a reliable and adaptive receiver for VLC (REAL-VLC) for low-end communication systems, an inexpensive receiver that senses light with complementary photodetectors and configures itself (physical and data link layers) dynamically to maintain the communication link. We implement the hardware and the software of REAL-VLC in low-end platforms, and experimentally validate it in representative test scenarios and a proofof-
concept application that consists of mobile nodes maintaining a VLC link under various lighting and path conditions.

Light emitting diodes
Optical receivers
Optical sensors
Optical transmitters
Photodetectors
Reliability
Design
Evaluation
FOV
Implementation
Internet of Lights
Reliable link
Spectral response
Tradeoff

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6226ea2c-9462-4cdf-8d05-8fb963bed3d9

https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2017.2774422

2021-08-17

0733-8716

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 36 (1), 149-161

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2018 Q. Wang, Domenico Giustiniano, Marco Zuniga