A Scottish company Pure VLC is preparing a revolution in the field of digital wireless communications. Their technology Li-Fi, which is used to exchange information light, can replace the traditional data transmission on the radio (Wi-Fi). As stated on the company’s website, their design allows to connect multiple devices without sacrificing performance and provides wireless speeds of up to 130 megabits per second.
As the transmitters in this system are the LEDs they quickly change the intensity of light that the human eye does not notice these fluctuations. But encoded in the blink the binary signal easily recognizes special optical sensors installed on computers or mobile devices.
«LEDs are electronic devices that can be switched on and off very quickly, «explains Harald Haas, who is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh. – Flashing light projects the data in the form of «zero» and «unit» with a very high speed and passes them to the photo detectors». Note that we are not talking about a very fast turn-off of light changes in intensity is small.
Haas first demonstrated this technology in 2011. Then he passed the video on to the computer using a table lamp. When he closed the light source by hand, the video stream stopped.
Now researchers are developing a special device that can convert an ordinary room lighting into Li-Fi network.
According to the scientist, the transmission of information via Wi-Fi is inconvenient so when the source location of the signal is in the next room, the connection quality and speed are reduced. Moreover, in places such as hotels and restaurants, which are connected to many devices, the bandwidth decreases as well.
Li-Fi does not have these problems. The special equipment synchronizes the lighting in all the rooms on a single frequency. The number of users is virtually unlimited.
The only significant disadvantage of the invention is that operation of the system requires the line of sight between the light source and receiver. In the future, the developers plan to increase the data transmission rate through Li-Fi to one Gigabit per second. Haas believes that the new technology can be widely used, for example, for communication with satellites.