Dreaming, Thinking: Communicating With Light

Dreaming, Thinking: Communicating With Light

Meet IEEE 802.11bb and pureLiFi

In academic research, we don’t dream enough. Increasingly, research is becoming a machine. You do some work, you get results, and you publish them. You sit back and watch for citations, and then you continue on. But, we perhaps miss out on two important things in research … thinking and dreaming.

First, though, we need … a problem. It may be a known problem, and, if it is, others will probably be working on it. But it may be a problem that no one really knows about, but it will be a problem once people see it.

Now, let the magic begin.

Thinking and dreaming

Thinking is freeing your mind and concentrating on the problem. Thinking is all part of setting aside some time away from exam marking, administration, and all the other things that distract us. Unfortunately, there’s no workload allocation model that will pencil in time for thinking, but it is probably one of the most important things that a researcher can do. Along with this, too, is properly reading research papers. Unfortunately, many researchers lose these basic skills once they complete their PhD. The research work can then get a little superficial — on the surface it seems that the person is an expert but gain their expertise on the shoulders of others.

Dreaming is not vision. A vision is knowing where you want to go, but dreaming is imagining where you could go if only something could fall into place. In dreaming, we define … “if only this could happen, we could then …”. A vision knows what will be in place and where we just need to make it happen.

And, so, in a Ted Talk, Professor Harald Haas dreamt of a world where we could communicate with light in open space:

It was a crazy, wacky idea. But, rather than just a dream, he demonstrated that it was possible. The world of “Li-fi” was born. Since then our receivers of light have become more sensitive, and the camera on your smart phone is probably sensitive enough to now pick up extremely small variations in light that your eye would never sense.

IEEE 802.11bb-2023

Now the IEEE has integrated Li-fi into the 802.11 standard for Wireless Comunications, and where we could transmitted with speeds of between10 Mbps to 89.6 Gbps. With your home wifi you could probably have a maximum (shared) bandwidth of around 540Mbps, but Li-fi could multiple than by more than 100. Obviously it would only be used for localised communcations, and, unlike radio waves, light does not travel well through most objects, and can get swamped by other sources of light (such as The Sun). Overall, it uses the infrasred part of the spectrum, and which is invisible to the human eye.

The new IEEE standard is defined as IEEE 802.11bb-2023 [here]:

While Lifi is still in the early stages of productisation, it can still suffer from local environment conditions. For this some researchers, such as Thomas Sandholm, have been investigating how Lifi could replace enterprise Wifi in a corporate environment [1], and identify key issues that this would face (Figure 1). A key finding is that Lifi could be used with traditional enterprise Wifi network, but where some of the bandwidth could be “off-loaded” onto localized Lifi setups. This “off-loaded” areas could be physical areas where it is difficult to get good wifi signals (such as in cubicles). A scenariou could thus be for intelligent switching of hosts between wifi and lifi.

pureLiFi

The major issue, though, at the current time is reliability, and we are so lucky in Edinburgh to host a company (PureLiFi — a spin-out from the University of Edinburgh) which is blazing the way in this field:

In February 2023, PureLiFi related Light Antenna One and which can integrate with smart phones, and have a throughput of more than 1Gpbs (for devices in a 10 feet range and in a 24 degree field of view). The great thing about the product is that it is compliant with the 802.11bb standard.

Conclusions

Take time to think. Take time to dream. Take time to define your vision.

I am proud to share a city — Edinburgh — with amazing people like Harald and with such a great company as pureLiFi. Thinking, dreaming and vision are a core part of research and can lead to amazing things. For each of our spin-outs (Zonefox, Symphonic, Cyacomb and MemCrypt), we have thought deeply about a problem and had the vision to see it through.

References

[1] Sandholm, T., Macaluso, I., & Mukherjee, S. (2023). WHO-IS: Wireless Hetnet Optimization using Impact Selection. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.03049.