DartNets Lab's DarkLight Won Best Video Award in MobiCom'16

With the rise in wearables such as smartwatches and fitness trackers that rely on smart sensors, and the continued popularity of smartphones, smartdevices are taking our country by storm. Wireless data for such devices is typically beamed through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, yet, the new wireless communication technology of “visible light communication (VLC),” has emerged as a new option albeit with limitations due to the challenges it faces in practice, such as being easily blocked or not being able to sustain transmission when light is off. Through a new Dartmouth project called “DarkLight,” researchers have developed and demonstrated for the first-time, how visible light can be used to transmit data even when the light appears dark or off. DarkLight provides a new communication primitive similar to infrared communication, however, it exploits the LED lights already around us rather than needing additional infrared emitters.

The study, “The DarkLight Rises: Visible Light Communication in the Dark,” was presented and demonstrated at “MobiCom 2016: The 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking” by Zhao Tian, the lead Ph.D. student for the project.

For a video about the DarkLight project, visit https://youtu.be/qwxLYC2z1C0.

Through DarkLight, light-based communication is sustained even when LEDs emit extremely low luminance, by encoding data into ultra-short, imperceptible light pulses by using off-the-shelf, low-cost LEDs ($7 each) and photodiodes ($6-8 each), semiconductor devices that convert light into a current. The current DarkLight prototype supports 1.6-Kbps data rate at 1.8-m distance.

DarkLight defies the long-standing assumption that visible light communication requires a visible light beam to shine. For end users/consumers, this means that visible light can be reused in many scenarios that were never considered possible until now.

For more detail, please check out the project website.

Check out the DartNets lab website to find out about other interesting projects.