Passive Communication with Ambient Light

Conference paper (2016)

Authors

Q. Wang Embedded Systems - EEMCS
Marco Zuniga Embedded Systems - EEMCS
Domenico Giustiniano IMDEA Networks Institute
Research Group
Embedded Systems (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Wireless communication Computer-Communication Networks Network architecture and Design
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

12-12-2016

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Embedded Systems

Abstract

In this work, we propose a new communication system for illuminated areas, indoors and outdoors. Light sources in our environments --such as light bulbs or even the sun-- are our signal emitters, but we do not modulate data at the light source. We instead propose that the environment itself modulates the {ambient} light signals: if mobile elements `wear' patterns consisting of distinctive reflecting surfaces, single photodiode could decode the disturbed light signals to read passive information. Achieving this vision requires a deep understanding of a new type of communication channel. Many parameters can affect the performance of passive communication based on visible light: the size of reflective surfaces, the surrounding light intensity, the speed of mobile objects, the field-of-view of the receiver, to name a few. In this paper, we present our vision for a passive communication channel with visible light, the design challenges and the evaluation of an outdoor application where our receiver decodes information from a car moving at 18 km/h.