Enhancing mobile device peripheral controls using Visible Light Communication (VLC)

Since its emergence, Optical communication systems have always been considered as a significantly attractive alternative to wired data transfer techniques, especially in environment where high data rate is essential in a multi-component system. Unfortunately, optical communication is still not as robust as traditional mechanisms and suffers from various types of distortion, such as jitter in data propagation. These issues can degrade the performance of a transmission system by introducing bit errors and uncontrolled offsets or displacements in the digital signals. However, these issues are more apparent with bidirectional full duplex data transfers in which complex bit streams are multiplexed within slotted intervals in a synchronized clock scheme. Although efforts have been made to improve robustness of the high bitrate data communication, we believe that optical communication may also be useful in environments where unidirectional control signals are passed down in a parallel bit stream in an asynchronous setup removing the need to multiplex data streams and assign timeslots to the transferred data. These low traffic control communication signals can be used to regulate a wide host of components and peripherals which may not be suitable in a traditional wired setup. For this purpose, our research focuses on utilizing a section of the conventional display to generate unidirectional control signals for attached modular peripherals. Using various display technologies, we proved that this type of control communication can robustly interact with external systems without the need for complex signal encoding, which is essential in traditional serial communication protocols. We believe that this technique can reduce signal encoding delays by relying on parallel processes for data transfer within a limited segment of the video frame in communicating with common peripheral devices.