WiFi over VLC using COTS Devices

We present a complete Visible Light Communications (VLC) transceiver system consisting of low-cost Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components. In particular, we show that COTS IEEE 802.11n (WiFi) devices can be used so that the physical and data link layers of radio frequency WiFi, i.e. 2.4 GHz, are reused for VLC. Moreover, as WiFi is fully integrated with the Linux system, higher protocols from network to transport and application layer can be used and tested in VLC-related experiments. Our approach has the advantage that a VLC experimenter can fully focus on VLC-related low level aspects like the design of novel VLC front-ends, e.g. LED drivers, lenses, and photodetectors and test their impact directly on the full network protocol stack in an end-to-end manner with real applications like adaptive video streaming. We present first results from experiments using our prototype showing the performance of unidirectional VLC transmission. Here we analyze the distortions introduced as well as the relationship between signal strength on frame error rate for different MCS and the maximum communication distance. Experimental results reveal that a data rate of up to 150 Mbps is possible over short ranges.