As LEDs become a more common source for room lighting,
they’re opening a new pathway for linking mobile devices to the
Internet, with the potential for wider bandwidth and quicker
response time than Wi-Fi. At least that’s what researchers such
as Harald Haas, chair of mobile communications at the University
of Edinburgh, are hoping.
“All the components, all the mechanisms exist already,” Haas
says. “You just have to put them together and make them work.”
Haas’s group, along with researchers from the Universities of ­
Cambridge, Oxford, St. Andrews, and Strathclyde, are halfway
through a four-year, £5.8 million project funded by the
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, in the United
Kingdom. They are pursuing ultraparallel visible light communication, which would use multiple colors of light to provide high-bandwidth linkages over distances of a few meters.
Such a Li-Fi system, as it’s been dubbed, could supplement or in
some instances replace traditional radio-based Wi-Fi, they say.
But taking on such a broadly used radio technology is an uphill
battle.
At the IEEE Photonics Conference in October, members of the
consortium showed off the progress they’re making. For instance,
the team has used commercially available red, green, and blue
LEDs as both emitters and as photodiodes to detect light. By
doing that, they created a system that could both send and
receive data at aggregate rates of 110 megabits per second.
When transmitting in one direction only, they reached a rate of
155 Mb/s.
But Haas says that this version is limited by existing LEDs, and by
the use of LEDs as transmitters and detectors at the same time.
Members of the consortium, however, have created a better LED,
which provides a data rate close to 4 gigabits per second
operating on just 5 milliwatts of optical output power and using
high-bandwidth photodiodes at the receiver. With a simple lens to
enhance the distance, they can send data 10 meters at up to 1.1
Gb/s, and soon they will increase that to 15 Gb/s, Haas says.
The 802.11ad Wi-Fi standard for the 60-gigahertz radio band
reaches just under 7 Gb/s, so Li-Fi would more than double that
rate.
They’re also using avalanche photodiodes to make better
receivers. In an avalanche photodiode, a single photon striking the
receiver produces a cascade of electrons, amplifying the signal.
Haas’s team at the Li-Fi R& Centre has created the first receiver
chip for Li-Fi with integrated avalanche photodiodes on CMOS.
The 7.8-square-millimeter IC houses 49 photodiodes.
Separately, the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems, in
Dresden, Germany, had announced plans to demonstrate a Li-Fi
hot spot in November (after press time) at the Electronica 2014
trade show in Munich. Frank Deicke, who leads the team
developing Li-Fi at Fraunhofer, says that the system would most
likely use infrared light and is aimed at industrial users rather than
consumers. The hot spot was set to be a point-to-point link with
a data rate of up to 1 Gb/s.
“You can have more or less the same data rate as over a USB
cable,” Deicke says. “That’s very challenging for most wireless
technologies, like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.” Another advantage, says
Deicke, is that the latency of Wi-Fi—the time between when a
signal is sent and when it’s received—is measured in milli­
seconds, whereas Li-Fi’s latency is on the order of microseconds.
In industrial applications, where data has to flow between
sensors, actuators, and a control unit, low latency and high data
rates would make Li-Fi useful in places where Wi-Fi is not. “We
don’t want to replace Wi-Fi,” he says. “That’s not our goal.”
But Deicke says Li-Fi could complement existing communications
technologies, including Wi-Fi and gigabit Ethernet. For now, his
group is not focusing on combining it with general lighting, as
Haas proposes.
A group of European academic researchers and networking
companies is aiming for the consumer market, though. The group
is working on a project called Advanced Convergent and Easily
Manageable Innovative Network Design (ACEMIND) to develop
ways to manage local networks in homes and small businesses. ­
ACEMIND includes a number of demonstrator projects to test
different technologies, including Li-Fi. Dmitris Katsianis at the
University of Athens, who is a participant in ACEMIND, thinks Li-Fi
might be in practical use within the next five years. “Li-Fi has the
advantage of being useful in electromagnetically sensitive areas
such as in hospitals, aircraft cabins, and power plants,” he says.
Haas is counting on a much bigger market. He expects LEDs to
evolve past just being light sources, much the same way the
cellphone evolved from a communications device to a mobile
computer. “In 25 years, every lightbulb in your house will have the
processing power of your cellphone today,” he says. “It will in the
future serve illumination as just one of many purposes.”

Source: www.spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/lifi-gets-ready-to-compete-with-wifi


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaoSp4NpkGg&itct=CDwQpDAYACITCOH_5fKi08gCFddDfgod6-cIJFIEbGlmaQ%3D%3D&client=mv-google&gl=NG&hl=en[center]

Huh...huh.. Say what

Too long and no sauce

The White man's always thinking!
Imaging what Africa will be like if we, Africans, can catch up with the standard in developed countries. Imagine sending a 1GByte Image file to another phone in same room within 30 seconds.

Crazy

Not a bad idea at all

Cool Using LED as a means of transfering data

Gosj01:
Too long and no sauce

Go buy indomie you go see 'sauce' or goan meet that suya guy down ur street for 'sauce'

Dis technology go reach this country after 20 years.

White men always thinking, black man, always bashing tecno, infinix, bla bla bla.

kul..check my signature below

Sibrah:
White man's always thinking!

and the zoo makes ur brain dull.

Good one

It's a laudable initiative. More laudable is the idea of deploying the photo-system in industrial areas rather than for home or domestic use because of the cancerous hazards associated with Light Emitting Diodes.

But then, no matter the anticipated higher data rate it could provide as compared to Wi-Fi , I'd rather the domestic users restricted to the Wi-Fi Micro-Wave technology, if there is lesser cancerous risks associated to it than is associated in Li-Fi Technology.

cool..i like when i hear about new innovations



CLICK HERE TO SEE MY POST ON NAIRALAND ON HOW BLOGGING IS CHANGIN MY LIFE

https://www.nairaland.com/2679830/say-blogging-does-not-pay

[quote author=ollah1 post=39200537][/quote] Lols... Funny human being

really cant wait....been reading about Li-fi for a while now.

Bn waiting for this. Glad this is gradually coming to fruition sooner than later.
Tis is a challenge to me, I must win a noble price.

[quote post=39184548]“In 25 years, every lightbulb in your house will have the
processing power of your cellphone today,” he says. “It will in the
future serve illumination as one of many other functions[/quote]

caught me attention.
Hopefully, I'll be alive if Christ tarris.

crotonite:


and the zoo makes ur brain dull.

There is a difference between 'not thinking enough' and 'being dull'. Even if you have issues with me and think I am dull, Your reply still makes no sense. Start thinking like the white man.

Owk

oppybouy:

Go buy indomie you go see 'sauce' or goan meet that suya guy down ur street for 'sauce'

No suya guy dey here...na ESTATE i dey live