LocalVLC: Augmenting Smart IoT Services with Practical Visible Light Communication

Visible Light Communication (VLC)emerges as a communication technology for Internet of Things (IoT)services with appealing benefits not present in existing radio-based communication. However, current VLC designs commonly require dedicated LED lights to emit modulated light beams which entail high energy overhead and unpleasant visual experiences due to the perceptible light blinking effects for end users. This greatly limits the deployment and applicable scenarios of VLC. In this paper, we design and develop LocalVLC, a practical and low-cost VLC system that can be used as a standard light source to augment smart IoT services. LocalVLC introduces a novel Morse-code inspired modulation scheme that can operate on off-the-shelf LEDs with low energy overhead. It can effectively overcome the light flickering by encoding data into high frequency light pulses without requiring extra processing hardware such as FPGA or micro-controller. We have implemented and evaluated a full-fledged system prototype based on LocalVLC design. Under practical settings, our LocalVLC prototype can support up to 10 meters of range, and attain reasonable throughput (up to 1.4 Kbps)with low error rate and energy consumption. Comparing with the widely adopted Manchester encoding, LocalVLC yields 8x improvement on both throughput and energy consumption. In addition, we demonstrate the practicality of LocalVLC through two IoT use cases where we developed two lightweight LocalVLC-based solutions using low-cost off-the-shelf hardware to exemplify the usage of LocalVLC for indoor service discovery and smart home key management.