Design of a network stack for directional visible light communication

Abstract

During the last years, Visible light communication (VLC), a novel technology that enables standard Light-Emitting-Diodes (LEDs) to transmit data, is gaining significant attention. In the near future, this technology could enable devices containing LEDs –such as car lights, city lights, screens and home appliances– to form their own networks. VLC, however, is currently limited to point-to-point communication. To unleash the full potential of VLC, more advance network capabilities are required. This Master Thesis presents the design and implementation of a novel research platform aimed at distributed multi-hop visible light communication. Compared to state-of-the-art platforms, our platform provides similar data rates and coverage, but adds two unique characteristics: (i) 360 degree coverage, which is necessary to investigate an important property of LED communication: directionality, and (ii) a flexible design, which allows our platform to be connected to many experimental boards such as Arduino, Beaglebone, Raspberry Pi and sensor nodes. We evaluate the communication properties of our board (link quality, neighbor discovery and packet forwarding), and hope that our work will lower the entry barrier for members of the pervasive and networking communities to investigate and exploit future LED-based networks.