Toward Designing a Li-Fi-Based Hierarchical IoT Architecture

Current wireless communication technologies, such as wireless-fidelity (Wi-Fi) and Bluetooth, use radio waves as the basic medium in transferring information. Even though these technologies are widely spread, the need of exploring alternatives to transmit data wirelessly and more efficiently is a must. The reason behind that relies on the current limitations of the radio frequency (RF) band, which include overcrowding and interference with other RF applications. To explore alternatives, much research has been conducted to prove the possibility of using visible light as a wireless medium for transferring data. As a result, a new technology was presented by a German physicist Harald Haas, called light-fidelity (Li-Fi), which is a wireless technology that utilizes visible light as a communication medium instead of using the basic radio wave. Recently, Li-Fi technology has attracted the research community. Various studies have been conducted to improve the technology. However, there is still a noticeable need to support the research field due to the modernity of the technology. Hence, this paper presents an extensive survey of the previous studies and projects conducted on the technology, besides multiple leading companies working on the manufacture of Li-Fi-compatible products. In addition, a Li-Fi-based IoT architecture is proposed in this paper, which relies on the collection of data from multiple environments, where Li-Fi is installed. Li-Fi-generated data are analyzed and processed to make intelligent decisions to enhance services in many sectors.