Li-Fi is a Visible Light Communications (VLC) system for data transmission. A simple VLC system has two qualifying components: 1) at least one device with a photodiode able to receive light signals and 2) a light source equipped with a signal processing unit.
A VLC light source could comprise of a fluorescent or light emitting diode (LED) bulb. Since a robust Li-Fi system requires extremely high rates of light output, LED bulbs are most ideal for implementing Li-Fi. LED is a semiconductor light source, which implies that LED light bulbs can amplify light intensity and switch rapidly. Therefore, LED cells can modulate thousands of signals without the human eye ever noticing. In turn, the changes in light intensity from the LED light source are interpreted and converted as electrical current by the receiving photodiode device. Once the electronic signal is demodulated, it is converted into a continuous stream of binary data comprising of audio, video, web, and application information to be consumed by any Internet-enabled device.
There is ample room for growing innovation in Li-Fi technology. Like conventional broadband and Wi-Fi, Li-Fi can also function as a bidirectional communication system. By interchanging visible light and infrared light from a photo detector, a mobile device connected to that photo detector can send data back to the light source for uplink. Also, multi-colored RGB (Red/Green/Blue) LED's at retina size could be engineered to send and receive a wider range of signals than single-colored phosphor-coated white LED's.
No comments:
Post a Comment