Abstract
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.
concept application that consists of mobile nodes maintaining a VLC link under various lighting and path conditions.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 149-161 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications |
Volume | 36 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Bibliographical note
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-careOtherwise 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.
Keywords
- Light emitting diodes
- Optical receivers
- Optical sensors
- Optical transmitters
- Photodetectors
- Reliability
- Design
- Evaluation
- FOV
- Implementation
- Internet of Lights
- Reliable link
- Spectral response
- Tradeoff