Harmony: A Time Synchronisation System for Visible Light Communication Access Points
2022 (English)In: SenSys 2022 - Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc , 2022, p. 435-447Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
High-speed visible light communication (VLC) is a complementary technology to conventional radio frequency communication in wireless networks. One of the essential traits of VLC systems is the ability to provide wireless communication and illumination seamlessly. High-speed VLC systems use high-power LEDs as transmitters in their access points (APs). In real-world deployments, overlapping light beams from multiple APs are necessary to avoid unlit areas. However, overlapping light beams could cause interference in each other's communication at the receiver; hence APs must synchronise their communication. This paper presents Harmony, a time synchronisation system for VLC APs to synchronise their transmissions. Internally, Harmony uses synchronous transmissions in the infrared frequency spectrum to reach nodes over multiple hops. The evaluation of a prototype implementation of Harmony on a small-scale testbed shows that it can synchronise nodes up to nine hops with a maximum error of a few 100s of nanoseconds. While the enduring work on high-speed VLC systems primarily focuses on improving the performance of individual APs, Harmony provides an infrastructure for enhancing system-wide performance.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery, Inc , 2022. p. 435-447
Keywords [en]
access points, concurrent transmissions, optical wireless communication, synchronous transmissions, time synchronisation, visible light communication, Light transmission, Synchronization, Communication access, Communications systems, Concurrent transmission, High Speed, Light beam, Optical-wireless communications, Synchronization systems, Synchronous transmission, Time synchronization
National Category
Communication Systems
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-63998DOI: 10.1145/3560905.3568549Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85147548546ISBN: 9781450398862 (electronic)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-63998DiVA, id: diva2:1738782
Conference
20th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, SenSys 2022, 6 November 2022 through 9 November 2022
2023-02-222023-02-222023-06-08Bibliographically approved