Li-Fi INSTEAD OF Wi-Fi?

"DATA TRANSMISSION THROUGH VISIBLE LIGHT POSSIBLE, says researchers"

Many of us are familiar with Wi-Fi technology and its impact in our daily lives. We cannot survive without it. Wi-Fi is being used everywhere like in repair shops, educational institutes, computer shops, offices. We have become quite dependent upon this technology that we can hardly imagine our life without it.

Wi-Fi technology can cover an entire home and it is band limited to 50-100 megabits per second today using IEEE802.11n standard. This is a good standard to use current services provided by internet like browsing and moving larger data files like softwares, HD movies, video games, music libraries etc. It may be very useful in today’s life but it may not be that efficient in future where we have a gesture recognition technology coming.

So here comes in the new technology names as VISIBLE LIGHT COMMUNICATION or simply VLC. It is more frequently referred to as Li-Fi(Light Fidelity).

This emerging new technology offers optical wireless communication by using visible light. An additional opportunity is arising by using current state-of-the-art LED lighting solutions for illumination and communication as the same time and with the same module. Hence when the LEDs are illuminating, their secondary duty will be to communicate data onto lighting system. This will be relevant in the indoor systems where the light will be fully ‘on’.

The premise behind VLC is that since light is always on and we have reflections everywhere communications can ride along for nearly free. The VLC technology include giga-speed technology, optical mobility technologies, navigation, precision location and gesture recognition technology.

For giga-speed technology, the Li-Fi Consortium defined GigaDock, GigaBeam, GigaShower, Giga Spot and GigaMIMO models to address different user scenarios for wireless indoor and indoor like data transfers. While GIgaDock is a wireless docking solution including wireless charging for smartphones, tablets or notebooks, with speeds upto 10Gbps, the GigaBeam model is a point to point data link for kiosk applications or portable-to-portable data exchanges. Thus a two hour full HD movie, whose size can be imagines around 5GB, can be transferred from one device to other in merely 4 seconds!

First applications of Li-Fi have already been put to use in hospitals where RF signals are a threat due to interference problems with medical equipment such as blood pumps and other life supporting instruments. The prototype of a mobile phone with an incorporated VLC system was presented by Casio in Las Vegas earlier this year. In coming years we are surely going to see more of the Li-Fi technology and more compatible products entering the market from labs.