Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
7-1-2016
Technical Report Number
TR2016-814
Abstract
Visible Light Communication (VLC) emerges as a new wireless communication technology with appealing benefits not present in radio communication. However, current VLC designs commonly require LED lights to emit shining light beams, which greatly limits the applicable scenarios of VLC (e.g., in a sunny day when indoor lighting is not needed). It also entails high energy overhead and unpleasant visual experiences for mobile devices to transmit data using VLC. We design and develop DarkLight, a new VLC primitive that allows light-based communication to be sustained even when LEDs emit extremely-low luminance. The key idea is to encode data into ultra-short, imperceptible light pulses. We tackle challenges in circuit designs, data encoding/decoding schemes, and DarkLight networking, to efficiently generate and reliably detect ultra-short light pulses using off-the-shelf, low-cost LEDs and photodiodes. Our DarkLight prototype supports 1.3-m distance with 1.6-Kbps data rate. By loosening up VLC's reliance on visible light beams, DarkLight presents an unconventional direction of VLC design and fundamentally broadens VLC's application scenarios.
Dartmouth Digital Commons Citation
Tian, Zhao; Wright, Kevin; and Zhou, Xia, "The DarkLight Rises: Visible Light Communication in the Dark" (2016). Computer Science Technical Report TR2016-814. https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/cs_tr/370
Comments
Expanded version of the MobiCom 2016 paper by the same title.