BlendVLC: A cell-free VLC network architecture empowered by beamspot blending

In visible light communication (VLC), the quality of communication is primarily dominated by line-of-sight links. To ensure an appropriate link quality anywhere, beamsteering has been proposed where transmitters (TXs) dynamically steer their beams to create beamspots on the users. However, these highly dynamic TXs face the beam tracking...

Breaking the limitations of visible light communication through its side channel

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a promising technology for future wireless communications. By modulating the visible light - -that has about 10,000x larger frequency band than that of radios - -to transmit data, VLC has the potential to provide ultra-high-speed wireless connectivities. However, it also has limitations such as i)...

Bracelet+: Harvesting the Leaked RF Energy in VLC with Wearable Bracelet Antenna

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is widely considered a promising technology for the coming 6G networks. Recent studies show that a VLC transmitter not only emits visible light signals but also leaks RF signals during the transmission. In this work, we devote effort to harvesting the free leaked RF energy from VLC transmissions. We observe that...

HueSense: Featuring LED Lights Through Hue Sensing

Visible Light Positioning (VLP) has been prevalent in providing high-precision localization systems in the past decade. However, the commercial availability or usage is still limited primarily due to the requirement of changing the existing lighting infrastructure. In this paper, we propose HueSense, an alternative technique to develop a passive...

Passive visible light networks: Taxonomy and opportunities

Artificial lighting has been used mainly for illumination for more than a century. Only recently, we have started to transform our lighting infrastructure to provide new services such as sensing and communication. These advancements have two key requirements: the ability to modulate light sources (for data transmission) and the presence of...

Enhancing Indoor IoT Communication with Visible Light and Ultrasound

The number of deployed Internet of Things (IoT) devices is steadily increasing to manage and interact with community assets of smart cities, such as transportation systems and power plants. This may lead to degraded network performance due to the growing amount of network traffic and connections generated by various IoT devices. To tackle...

PassiveVLP: Leveraging Smart Lights for Passive Positioning

Positioning based on visible light is gaining significant attention. But most existing studies rely on a key requirement: The object of interest needs to carry an optical receiver (camera or photodiode). We remove this requirement and investigate the possibility of achieving accurate positioning in a passive manner—that is, without requiring...

Exploiting Blockage in VLC Networks Through User Rotations

Visible Light Communication (VLC) has attracted significant attention over the past decade. Although numerous research studies have been performed to improve the data rate of VLC links, an important fact has been largely neglected: human bodies that host VLC receivers could block their Line-of-Sight (LOS) downlinks, and thus, degrade the system...

Large-Area and Visible-Light-Driven Heterojunctions of In₂O₃/Graphene Built for ppb-Level Formaldehyde Detection at Room Temperature

Achieving convenient and accurate detection of indoor ppb-level formaldehyde is an urgent requirement to ensure a healthy working and living environment for people. Herein, ultrasmall In₂O₃ nanorods and supramolecularly functionalized reduced graphene oxide are selected as hybrid components of visible-light-driven (VLD)...

SmartVLC: Co-Designing Smart Lighting and Communication for Visible Light Networks

Visible Light Communication (VLC) based on LEDs has been a hot topic investigated for over a decade. However, most of the research efforts assume the intensity of LED light is constant. This hypothesis is not true when Smart Lighting is introduced to VLC, which requires LEDs to adapt their brightness based on the intensity of natural ambient...