CAREER: Towards Practical Mobile Visible Light Communication

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is an emerging technology that uses light (optical) energy to communicate. VLC is increasing in popularity for research and development, however, still has significant gaps to cover to become a standalone mobile technology. These gaps are particularly in improving communication data rates and range, making the technology viable for mobile conditions, and conditioning the technology for low-energy battery sourced operation.

Today, the development efforts in VLC have largely been confined within a limited set of research labs around the globe, thus making the technology less accessible and known to the public. This also puts students and faculty from academic departments which do not have the infrastructure and knowledge--base to teach and/or research in VLC at a great disadvantage.

With an overarching vision to realize VLC as a practical wireless commercial mobile technology, this project executes a plan to achieve this goal through a unified set of integrated research, education, and outreach activities. This project studies and designs machine learning models to improve throughput, design novel techniques for maintaining VLC links under mobility, designs energy-aware strategies for VLC transmission and reception, and experimentally validates the solutions through prototype implementations under controlled and real-world conditions.

In parallel, this project performs educational outreach that is well-integrated with the research efforts, by developing research experiences for undergraduates (REU) and designing a novel VLC hands-on learning kit to be made freely accessible to the public.

This project’s five-year research and education plan focuses on addressing the fundamental impediments for realizing reliable and robust VLC under practical constraints in real world applications. The target goals for VLC performance are medium-long ranges, Mega-Giga bits-per-second throughput and battery operation under static and mobile conditions.

To achieve these goals, this project uses an experimentation and data driven approach realized through a set of integrated research and educational activities along five key objectives, which are: 1.) Achieving High Throughput and Long Range using novel transmission and reception techniques; 2.) Building Mobility Resilience using novel hardware and sensor-fusion; 3.) Optimizing Energy Usage using novel signal designs and low-energy communication protocols; 4.) Prototype Implementation and Experimental Evaluation; and 5.) Enhance VLC Education and Outreach. The VLC learning kit creates a new resource for the VLC research community and the public.

The REU efforts create a direct impact on URM students in Atlanta and Georgia State University’s large population of African-American and Hispanic students. Overall, this project motivates the community to study and operate VLC in real-world conditions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.