A Novel Approach for Indoor Wide Area Monitoring Network Based on Visible Light Communication

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) can provide a new way for wireless communication for humans. It comes with unique features and advantages like large unregulated bandwidth, electromagnetic interference free communication, low power consumption, high data rate, existing infrastructure can be used for communication, illumination and communication can be possible at the same time. These advantages can be exploited for indoor communication as radio frequency (RF) communication has spectrum scarcity. Internet of things (IoT) is a new paradigm for interconnecting different devices. As an alternative to RF, we can employ VLC to interconnect different IoT devices in indoor environment. Thus, we propose monitoring system and new modulation techniques to enhance VLC. The proposed monitoring system developed using VLC only and can communicate in a long distance with low error rate. A communication protocol was proposed to reduce communication delay and frame loss during different phase of communication. We also proposed two modulation techniques for VLC namely data dependent multiple pulse position modulation and multilevel pulse width modulation. We experimentally demonstrate the performance and advantages in terms of communication efficiency. To ensure the security in VLC we also proposed a framework for secure data communication. We have classified the medium access control layer into two parts one part is used for authentication and another part is used for data demodulation. In addition, a mapping algorithm was introduced for efficient communication using VLC. We also proposed multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication as it can give additional bandwidth and receiver diversity. Two types of MIMO antenna configurations were considered 2×2 and 4×4. We observe the performance using four different modulation techniques, which can help to make efficient network planning for IoT devices.