Edge-Light: Exploiting Luminescent Solar Concentrators for Ambient Light Communication

Abstract

A recent advance in embedded Internet of Things (IoT) exploits ambient light for wireless communication. This new paradigm enables highly efficient links via simple light modulation, but the design space has a fundamental constraint: in most State of the Art (SoA) studies, the link can only follow the propagation direction of ambient light. Consider, for example, a swarm of drones and ground robots that want to communicate with sunlight. Drone-to-robot communication could be possible because sunlight travels downwards from the air (drone) to the ground (robot), allowing drones to modulate light to send information to robots beneath them. Robot-to-robot communication, however, is not possible because sunlight does not travel sideways (parallel to the ground). To allow 'lateral communication' with ambient light, we propose using Luminescent Solar Concentrators (LSC). These optical components receive ambient light on their surface and re-direct part of the spectra towards their edges. Considering this optical property of LSC, our work has three main contributions. First, we benchmark various optical properties of LSC to assess their performance for ambient light communication. Second, we combine LSC with liquid crystal (LC) shutters to form lateral links with ambient light. Third, we test our links indoors and outdoors with artificial and natural ambient light, by enhancing two robots with our LSC transceivers and showing that they can exchange basic commands and coordinate tasks by communicating only with sunlight.