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Lighting Up the Internet of Things with DarkVLC

Published: 23 February 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Visible Light Communication (VLC) holds a great potential to solve the spectrum crunch problem and to provide scalable connectivity to zillions of mobile and IoT devices. However, VLC commonly requires LED lights to be on, which fundamentally limits the applicable scenarios of VLC and makes VLC less attractive to mobile and IoT devices with tight energy budget. We present DarkVLC, a new VLC primitive that allows the VLC link to be sustained even when the LED lights appear dark or off. The key idea is to encode data into ultra-short light pulses imperceptible to human eyes yet detectable by devices equipped with photodiodes. Realizing DarkVLC faces several challenges to generate and deal with the ultra-short light pulses reliably. We describe our preliminary efforts to tackle these challenges and build a DarkVLC prototype using off-the-shelf LEDs and low-cost photodiodes. DarkVLC fundamentally broadens the application scenarios of VLC and provides a new ultra-low power, always-on connectivity affordable for mobile and IoT devices.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HotMobile '16: Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications
    February 2016
    120 pages
    ISBN:9781450341455
    DOI:10.1145/2873587
    • General Chair:
    • David Chu,
    • Program Chair:
    • Prabal Dutta
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 23 February 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. energy efficiency
    2. internet of things
    3. visible light communication

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    HotMobile '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 18 of 55 submissions, 33%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 96 of 345 submissions, 28%

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