Low-Cost Optical Camera Communications for IoT

Visible light communication (VLC) based on an optical camera system is a promising technology for indoor IoT applications. It offers advantages such as reduced interference and improved performance but also suffers from limited data rate transmission due to the fixed capture rate of an image sensor. This study aims to address this limitation by integrating multiple low-cost CMOS sensors with precise synchronization to receive successive data bits. The paper presents the design of a cost-effective functional prototype implementation of a multi-spatial receiver consisting of multiple image sensors capable to provide a continuous data rate of 500 bps with a theoretical aggregated receive rate of 1.6 Mbps. The system performance is evaluated under varying indoor lighting conditions and distances. The proposed system demonstrates its effectiveness for indoor IoT optical communications. Furthermore, the use of several cameras makes it feasible to provide location capabilities without requiring additional hardware or complex algorithms.