Biblio

Visible Light Communication (VLC) allows to reuse a lighting infrastructure for communication while its main purpose of illumination can be carried out at the same time. Light sources based on Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are attractive as they are inexpensive, ubiquitous, and allow rapid modulation. This paper describes how to integrate smartphones into such a communication system that supports networking for a wide range of devices, such as toys with single LEDs as transmitter and receivers as well as interconnected LED light bulbs. The main challenge is how to employ the smartphone without any (hardware) modification as a receiver, using the integrated camera as a (slow) light sampling device. This paper presents a simple software-based solution, exploiting the rolling shutter effect and slow motion video capturing capabilities of latest smartphones to enable continuous reception and real-time integration into an existing VLC system. Evaluation results demonstrate a working prototype and report communication distances up to 3m and a maximum data throughput of more than 1200b/s, improving upon previous work.