Infrared Optical Wireless Communication for Smart Door Locks Using Smartphones

With the recent rapid advancements in the Internet-of-Things (IoT), one of the applications being developed is that of smart door lock (SDL) systems. SDL are intended to offer high security, easy access and easy sharing. Unlike existing SDL solutions that mostly use biometrics or crunched RF spectrum, we uniquely propose to use Infrared (IR) optical wireless signal (OWS) using IR light emitting diode (LED) of smartphones. We designed and developed a complete system of Android smartphone app including physical layer encoding, a cloud server and programmable hardware prototypes using Arduino as well as Raspberry Pi. Optlock includes multi-level security schemes including user registration, authentication and authorization using one-time-password (OTP). Our extensive experiments show 100% accuracy with 1.33 kbps of average data rate is achieved up to 20 meters of distance between a smartphone and a lock. It allows convenient remote access, easy access control and sharing as well as high security.