Purple VLC: Accelerating Visible Light Communication in Room-Area through PRU Offloading.

Embedded VLC (Visible Light Communication) has attracted significant research attention in recent years. A reliable and robust VLC system can become one of the IoT communication technologies for indoor environment. VLC could become a wireless technology complementary to existing RF-based technology but with no RF interference. However, existing low cost indicator-type LED based VLC platforms have limited throughput and reliability. In this work, we introduce a new embedded VLC platform that can achieve 100 kbps aggregate throughput at a distance of 6 meters, which is 6-7x improvement over state-of-the-art. Our design combines I/O offloading in computation, concurrent communication with polarized light, and full-duplexing to offer more than 99% link reliability at a distance of 6 meters.