The radio frequency spectrum is already getting extremely congested due to the rapidly increasing demand for bandwidth. Therefore, visible light communication (VLC), which operates at very high frequencies (greater than 200 THz) and thereby offers a very high bandwidth, is considered as an important technological candidate of in-home and access telecommunication networks. Furthermore, VLC has the potential to use already available illumination infrastructure for communication, thus minimizing the cost and power consumption of a separate communication infrastructure. The effort of using VLC for an in-home access solution started with IEEE P802.15.7 standard for short-range wireless optical communication. However, the physical layer solutions proposed in IEEE P802.15.7 are limited to 96 Mb/s and thus should be further optimized to keep pace with the ever-increasing bandwidth requirements: for example, 5G solutions already require minimum per user bitrate of 100 Mb/s or peak bitrates of 10 Gb/s, latency below 1 ms, and a density of 100 Mb/s/m2, and these requirements are very challenging.
The concurrent growth in Internet of Things (IoT) has not only necessitated the bandwidth increase but it will also require energy efficient transmission and reception technologies so that the IoT nodes, which are usually low-powered and less process intensive, can be optimally integrated with VLC. This integration of VLC with IoT nodes requires novel medium access control protocols, bandwidth allocation algorithms and newer modulation formats. In addition, a parallel radio frequency over fiber (RFoF) link can be used to further increase the accessibility of the sensors, which will also give us an opportunity to achieve load balancing and enhance reliability of the system.
Thus, an optimal in-home communication technology should be evolved on various aspects:
a) Optimal architecture (receiver and transmitter design, coding, modulation schemes, multiplexing schemes, energy efficiency)
b) Optimal MAC protocols and algorithms (related to quality of service (QoS) performance)
In this project, we will develop and demonstrate an end-to-end in-home telecommunication network which will exploit the advantages of VLC and also focus on its optimal integration with RFoF and IoT network. We will optimize the throughput of the VLC architecture and would employ RFoF networks to transmit high-capacity signals through the use of innovative concepts in RFoF such as advanced modulation formats, optical nonlinearity compensation and RFoF link optimization.