Using LED Lighting for Ubiquitous Indoor Wireless Networking

—Wireless networking is currently dominated by radio frequency (RF) techniques. However, the soon-to-be ubiquity of LED-based lighting motivated by significant energy savings provides an opportunistic deployment of widespread free-space optical (FSO) communications. LEDbased network transceivers have a variety of competitive advantages over RF including high bandwidth density, security, energy consumption, and aesthetics. They also use a highly reusable unregulated part of the spectrum (visible light). In this paper we describe results from a pilot project to demonstrate the viability of an optical free-space visible light transceiver as a basis for indoor wireless networking. Inexpensive, commercial, off-the shelf LEDs and photodiodes we used to construct two prototypes; a simplex channel as expected as a component of an asymmetric/hybrid RFFSO system, and a full-duplex channel demonstrating the ability to isolate multiple channels. On— off keying (OOK) was applied without observa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: WIMOB
• Authors: Thomas D. C. Little, Peter Dib, Kandarp Shah, Nick Barraford, Beth Gallagher
• Keywords: Inexpensive Fso Transceivers, Mobile Computing, Visible Light, Widespread Free-space, WIMOB 2008