LiFOD: Lighting Extra Data via Fine-grained OWC Dimming

Abstract

Optical wireless communication (OWC) shows great potential for high-speed communication due to its broad spectrum and the exceptional intensity switching speed of LEDs. Under poor conditions, most OWC systems switch from complex and more error prone high-order modulation schemes to the more robust On-Off Keying (OOK) modulation defined in the IEEE OWC standard. This paper presents LiFOD, a high-speed indoor OOK-based OWC system with fine-grained dimming support. While ensuring fine-grained dimming, LiFOD remark-ably achieves robust communication at up to 400 Kbps at a distance of 6 meters. This is the first time that the data rate has improved via OWC dimming in comparison to the previous approaches that consider trading off dimming and communication. LiFOD makes two key technical contributions. First, LiFOD utilizes Compensation Symbols (CS) as a reliable side-channel to represent bit patterns dynamically and improve throughput. Second, LiFOD synchronously redesigns optical symbols and CS relocation schemes for fine-grained dimming and robust decoding. Experiments on low-cost Beaglebone prototypes with commercial LED lamps and the photodiode (PD) demonstrate that LiFOD significantly outperforms the state-of-art system with at least 2.1x throughput on the SIGCOMM17 data-trace.