Integrated Communication and Sensing with RGB LEDs

Master thesis (2021)

Authors

Y. YAN Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

Q. Wang Embedded Systems - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
F.A. Kuipers Embedded Systems - EEMCS (supervisor 2)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2021 YIXUN YAN
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Published Date

29-11-2021

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

Visible Light Communication (VLC) has gained popularity due to its inherent security as a complementary technology to Radio Frequency (RF) in the last decades to solve the "spectrum crunch'' problem. Meanwhile, The latest IEEE 802.11ah standard, also called WiFi HaLow, offers the range, throughput, and low power consumption that is extremely suitable for most simple IoT appliances for industrial, agricultural, and smart city environments. In general, these IoT products are connected in huge numbers. Hence, provisioning these simple IoT products that usually do not have any user interface like a keyboard or a display in a simple, robust, secure, and scalable method is a significant challenge.

VLC technology has been intriguing both industry and academia for connecting IoT products over the last few years. The signals used in VLC, the visible light, can be captured by eyes and be confined by walls and other blockages which introduce the security against eavesdropping. Besides, the features of low deployment cost, high throughput and high security make VLC a solution to provision IoT products securely. This project exploits on-device existing RGB LEDs to achieve a low-cost and secure device provision system called Integrated Visible Light Communication and Sensing (I-VLCS) System with the functionality of the integrated communication and sensing with RGB LEDs. Visible Light Positioning (VLP), a subset of Visible Light Sensing, is also used in the I-VLCS system to further improve the system security. The performance of the proposed I-VLCS system is evaluated through experiments, demonstrating that that the system can support a maximum 50 cm of communication range with a high communication and positioning accuracy.