High-Performance OCC with Edge Processing on SPAD and Event-Based Cameras

Optical camera communications (OCC) is an optical wireless communications (OWC) technique that uses a camera as an array of receivers to simultaneously receive from single to many transmitters. Unlike other OWC methods such as Li-Fi, OCC allows system designers to side-step the need for co-existence and multi-access schemes. However, it is limited in data through-put due to the use of practical frame-limited camera sensors. In this article, we present a system advancement of OCC, called high-performance OCC (HP-OCC), that overcomes these limitations and improves performance. HP-OCC encompasses on-sensor edge processing, dynamic resource allocation on the edge, a frameless sensing principle, and seamless pixel switching to achieve data rates comparable to other OWC techniques. A proof-of-concept is demonstrated on a 7x7 pixel SPAD-based HP-OCC receiver, achieving up to 6Mb/s of throughput per pixel limited by SPAD performance. In addition to communications, HP-OCC's ability to simultaneously receive from multiple transmitters can be paired with optical ranging to perform localization. We highlight how these capabilities may be instrumental in 6G applications especially in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication systems. Finally, we conclude with some reflections and discuss future full-functionality implementations on silicon.