IEEE WoWMoM 2019  (acceptance rate 17.8%)

LocalVLC: Augment Smart IoT Services with Practical Visible Light Communication

Abstract:

Visible Light Communication (VLC) emerges as a communication 
technology for Internet of Things (IoT) services with appealing 
benefits not present in existing radio-based communication. 
However, current VLC designs commonly require dedicated LED 
lights to emit modulated light beams which entail high energy 
overhead and unpleasant visual experiences due to the perceptible 
light blinking effects for end users. This greatly limits the 
deployment and applicable scenarios of VLC. In this paper, we 
design and develop LocalVLC, a practical and low-cost VLC system 
that can be used as a standard light source to augment smart 
IoT services. LocalVLC introduces a novel Morse-code inspired 
modulation scheme that can operate on off-the-shelf LEDs with 
low energy overhead. It can effectively overcome the light 
flickering by encoding data into high frequency light pulses 
without requiring extra processing hardware such as FPGA or 
micro-controller. We have implemented and evaluated a 
full-fledged system prototype based on LocalVLC design. Under 
practical settings, our LocalVLC prototype can support up to 
10 meters of range, and attain reasonable throughput 
(up to 1.4 Kbps) with low error rate and energy consumption. 
Comparing with the widely adopted Manchester encoding, 
LocalVLC yields 8x improvement on both throughput and energy 
consumption.  In addition, we demonstrate the practicality of 
LocalVLC through two IoT use cases where we developed two 
lightweight LocalVLC-based solutions using low-cost off-the-shelf 
hardware to exemplify the usage of LocalVLC for indoor service 
discovery and smart home key management.


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IEEE Library Access

@INPROCEEDINGS{Haus:WoWMoM2019, 
author={M. {Haus} and A. Y. {Ding} and J. {Ott}},
booktitle={2019 IEEE 20th International Symposium on "A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks" (WoWMoM)}, 
title={LocalVLC: Augment Smart IoT Services with Practical Visible Light Communication}, 
year={2019},
pages={1-9},
doi={10.1109/WoWMoM.2019.8793022},
}

Michael Haus, Aaron Yi Ding, Joerg Ott, "LocalVLC: Augment Smart IoT Services with Practical Visible Light Communication", In Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM), Washington DC, USA, 2019.