Visible Light Communications for IoT services based on high-power LEDs in Industry 4.0

In the framework of Industry 4.0, visible light communications (VLC) are proposed for providing connectivity in those environments where radio-frequency (RF) transmission achieves a poor performance or it is even banned [1]. Specifically, VLC are potentially useful for providing Internet of Things (IoT) services while consuming a small portion of the transmission resources, considering a user-centric approach and subject to a low-cost implementation [2]. Recently, the European Commission warned about the need for employing low-cost and energy-efficient LEDs for future VLC systems to maintain the reduction in the energy consumption [3]. As a consequence, the VLC-IoT hardware implementations must consider commercial LEDs, which are subject to non-linearities, reduced and unknown bandwidth and other impairments for data transmission, while maintaining the energy efficiency for illumination purposes. In this work, a low-cost VLC-IoT implementation is presented based on commercial high-power LEDs. The proposed configuration is focused on providing connectivity in those environments where RF transmission is not efficient so that an external access point (AP) distributes the connectivity through a backhaul link that feeds the set of optical access points (APs).