VISVESVARAYA TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY

JnanaSangama, Belagavi – 590018

A TECHNICAL SEMINAR REPORT

on

“Li-Fi Technology”
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of degree of

BACHELOR OF ENGINEERING
IN
ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONICS

Submitted by:
MRIGESH CHANDRA
USN: 1AY13EE049

Under the Guidance of

Mr. KARTHIK S
Asst. Professor, Dept. of EEE

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING

ACHARYA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Soldevanahalli, Bengaluru – 560107
Year 2018 – 2019
 ACHARYA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
SOLDEVANAHALLI, BENGALURU - 560107

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS

ENGINEERING

CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that the Technical Seminar report on the current topic entitled “Li-Fi
TECHNOLOGY” has been successfully carried out by MRIGESH CHANDRA
(1AY13EE049) in partial fulfilment for the award of Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical
and Electronics Engineering of the Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belagavi
during the academic year 2018-2019. The Technical Seminar report has been approved, as
it satisfies the academic requirements in respect of Technical Seminar on current topic
prescribed for B.E Degree.

Signature of Guide Signature of co-ordinator Signature of HOD

(Mr. Karthik S) (Dr. Shivakumar Aradhya R S) (Prof. R. Prakash)
Assistant Professor Professor Head of the Department
Department of EEE, AIT Department of EEE, AIT Department of EEE, AIT
 DECLARATION

I, MRIGESH CHANDRA, student of VIII Semester B.E in the Department of Electrical

and Electronics Engineering, AIT, Bengaluru hereby declare that the Technical Seminar
entitled “Li-Fi TECHNOLOGY” has been carried out under the supervision of Mr.
KARTHIK S, Assistant Professor, Dept. of EEE, AIT, and submitted in partial fulfilment
of the requirements for the award of degree in Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical and
Electronics Engineering of Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belagavi during
academic year 2018– 2019.

PLACE: BENGALURU MRIGESH CHANDRA

(1AY13EE049)
DATE:
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The satisfaction and euphoria that accompany the successfully completion of a task would
be incomplete without the mention of the people who make it possible and without whose
constant guidance and encouragement, success would not have been possible.

I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. S.C. Pilli, Principal, AIT, for all the facilities
that he has extended throughout my work.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Prof. R. Prakash, HOD Dept. of EEE, AIT,
for his valuable guidance and support.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Internal Guide Mr Karthik S, Assistant

Professor, Dept. of EEE, AIT, for her valuable guidance, encouragement and suggestion
which helped me a lot in the completion of the Technical Seminar.

Finally, I express my sincere thanks to my Parents, all teaching and non-teaching faculty
members, well-wishers and friends for their moral support, encouragement and help
throughout the completion of the Technical Seminar.

MRIGESH CHANDRA
(1AY13EE049)
 ABSTRACT
In the present era, Wi-Fi is the most trending domain. As internet users almost double every year,
there is an enormous load on radio spectrum that leads to congestion. To get better bandwidth,
efficiency and speed, a new technology Li-Fi has evolved. Li-Fi stands for Light Fidelity. It is a
bidirectional and wireless mode of communication using light. It uses the unused visible spectrum
and reduces the load on radio spectrum. Li-Fi can be simply put to be Wi-Fi but instead of radio
waves, light is used as a medium. Here, data is transmitted using light whose intensity varies faster
than human eye to capture. Instead of using modems, Li-Fi uses LED bulbs with transceiver. Data
transmission in Li-Fi is about 100 times faster than Wi-Fi. Here, in this report we explore the need
for Li-Fi Technology.
Li-Fi Technology 2017-18

Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION 7

2. LITERATURE SURVEY 9

3. OVERVIEW OF Li-Fi TECHNOLOGY 11

4. PROPERTIES OF LED BASED DATA COMMUNICATION 12

5. WORKING 13

6. FEATURES OF Li-Fi 16

7. APPLICATIONS 17

8. ADVANTAGES 18

9. CONCLUSION 19

10. REFERENCES 21

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Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION
In today’s world communication between the devices are much common. Radio wave spectrum
is very small part of spectrum available for communication. But with increase in advanced
technology and number of user the network becomes overloaded which results in failure to
provide high data rate. Visible light acts as rival to the present wireless radio frequency
communication by achieving larger bandwidth and high data rate. Because with larger frequency
spectrum it is possible to provide a larger portion of the bandwidth to each user to transfer
information.

A switching LED can be improbably causing annoyance, but data can therefore be encoded in the
light by varying the rate at the LEDs switch on and off to provide various strings of 1’s and 0’s.
The use of fast pulses of light to transfer data without physical connection such method is called
as Visible light communication (VLC). The LEDs can be switched ON and OFF very fast which is not
noticeable by human eye thus the light source appear to be constantly on. When these signals
transmitted to the receiver via the wireless channel, the photo diode will convert these optical
signals to electrical signals and the original information will be recovered.

On the basis of visible light communication technology, the advanced technology called Li-Fi
provide dual function of visible light LED for illumination and data transmission. Li-Fi is very latest
version of Wi-Fi which uses visible light in place of radio waves. Hence, visible light data
transmission rate have higher speed than other broadband. It overcomes the problem related
with Wi-Fi, because Li-Fi has wider network area so traffic handling capacity improved and it is
cheaper than Wi-Fi.

The VLC system is compared with other wireless communication system that are in current use
like LAN and Wi-Fi. LAN is available in very short range and it is not mobile. And Wi-Fi has low
traffic handling capacity as number of user increases Wi-Fi becomes unable to achieve user’s
need. Li-Fi offers significant capability to resolve this problem compared with Wi-Fi. It transmits
data by switching LEDs on and off rapidly by changing light intensity which is not detected by
human eye. The data transmission rate is about 10Gbps by using white bright LED. When an
image sensor is used as a receiver, light sources are almost perfectly separated on a focal plane
(a pixel array) because there are a massive number of pixels, and optical signals are separately
output from each pixel. This prevents signals from becoming mixed, thus allowing
communication, even if many LED transmitters and superfluous lights (noise sources) such as
sunlight and streetlights are present. The indoor visible light communication uses visible light
spectrum to provide high rate data transmission which at the same time used as energy efficient

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illumination. In this way, the idea of the dual function of communication and illumination offers
opportunity for efficient cost reduction and carbon footprint reductions.

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Chapter 2

LITERATURE REVIEW
A wireless communication using visible light is not new [1], from ancient time humans used light
to communicate across long distances. At present, there are many Infrared based system
developed to support high speed data rate [2]. The current used wireless technologies such as Wi-
Fi, Bluetooth, RF communication, have low speed data transmission compared to that visible light
communication. The data rate for visible light systems is in Gbps range. However, this technology
is very cost efficient when compared to the current wireless networks such as Wi-Fi. There are
various LED based systems are designed in [3, 4] that can provide data rates greater than 10
Mbps. In research [3], VLC system using fast switching LEDs was designed on traffic light LEDs to
support wireless audio data broadcasting. The authors in [4] designed the VLC system using blue
LED and yellow LED where 400 Mbps data transmission rate was achieved. The combination of
blue and yellow LEDs produce white brightness thus, when these blue or yellow LEDS glow
constantly it seems to be white to human eye. At the receiver side filter is used after the
photodiode to separate out the yellow light.

White LEDs have several features such as high brightness, low power consumption, long life span
and robustness. Later, an indoor visible light system using white LEDs was designed [5]. There
were number of lights installed in a room with considering proper optical path difference,
investigating their influence on reflection and interference based on numerical analyses and
simulations. This system can achieve data rate up to several hundred Mbps. Further, researchers
in [6] implemented Multiple Input Multiple Output optical (MIMO) wireless system using LED
lighting where a room is illuminated by array of LEDs. So, the system is capable to support parallel
data transmission. With the use of optical MIMO technique the system can potentially achieve
high data rates.

Further, more improvements were done by adapting proper coding method, new modulation
techniques and multiplexing methods to increase data rate. Research paper [7] reporting 513
Mbps data transmission by using discrete multi-tone (DMT) modulation technique. The
researchers have developed a new digital modulation technique called Intensity Modulation (IM)
in [8] which can be used in optical wireless communication using incoherent LEDs. In this
modulation technique the information to be transmitted is varied by varying the intensity of
light.

A Li-Fi consortium is formed in October 2011 by group of technology companies and research
institutions [9]. These group introduced new technology for high speed optical wireless
communication system in the market. Li fi use visible light spectrum instead of radio frequency
spectrum which can solve issues of limited amount of radio wave spectrum achieves data

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rate around 10Gbps [10]. The consortium accepts Li-Fi technology would become complement
to current wireless technology such as Wi Fi, RF communication etc. The research groups and
centres that are taking part in build-up Li-Fi technology involves University of Oxford,
University of Scotland, University of Edinburgh and University of California.

There are several interesting research relating VLC have been done to achieve Gigabit
communication. Research [11] present detail implementation of VLC communication system for
mobile devices to short range applications where gigabit baseband system is implemented
using optical front end system and base band system to achieve gigabit data rate. In IEEE
802.15.7 Draft D8 [12], the author illustrates that VLC have advantages over Short range wireless
optical communication standard. Recently, eco-friendly data communication using visible light is
demonstrated in [13]. Here the system was designed with white LEDs at transmitter to transmit
audio signal and solar panel at receiver side connected with amplifier and speaker to receive
original signal. Work in [14] describes optical communication through visible light that uses LED
flashlight and camera. This system uses image processing techniques for computing captured
image to receive original signal.

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Chapter 3

OVERVIEW OF Li-Fi TECHNOLOGY

An advance way to transfer information could drastically change path that systems can
communication with each other called Li-Fi. Li-Fi uses visible light to transfer data between two
devices which do not have physical connection. This idea is inspired from VLC which uses
visible light LED for transmitting data. An Infra- Red remote control works by switching an IRLED
on and off with 38 kHz frequency. This light is detected by the sensor and microcontroller
connected in TV converts it into commands. In place of IR Li-Fi uses visible light to transfer data
between two devices. Visible light has wider range of electromagnetic spectrum which gives an
advantage for increasing speed. By encoding, the colour LEDs like yellow and blue can use
for high data rate because combination of both yellow and blue make white bright
luminance.

Li-Fi can overcome the problems that users face in wireless communication which uses radio
waves. Radio waves utilises electromagnetic wave spectrum which is very small part of
communication available. Li-Fi offers unlicensed and freely available where light source is
available, thus user can utilise wider range of bandwidth which increases traffic handling capacity
of the system. Because the bandwidth is freely available data is transmitted with higher
transmission rate. Visible light is safe to use, no electromagnetic spectrum is used in visible light
communication does not cause any health hazards because visible light does not penetrates
through wall while electromagnetic waves penetrates through walls. Thus use of Wi-Fi is not
allowed in hospital and aircrafts. The basic concept behind offering high data rate is direct Line
of sight. Line of sight between transmitter and receiver should be provide properly. If any
obstacle comes in between transmitter and receiver, line of sight get disturbed and
corresponding communication will lost. But advantage of this is a hacker outside room cannot
utilise data. With help of direct line of sight Li-Fi can achieves greater than 1Gbps. This
advancement technique can achieve theoretical speed around 10Gbps [1].

Li-Fi is made up with modified LED bulbs and power consumption through LEDs is less so overall
system design is very simple. Thus, the VLC system is cheap, secure and simple. The data is
transfer by switching the LED on and off very fast. On switching LED continuously on and off
flickering is arise which can be detected by photodiodes but invisible for human eye. Different
data can be transmitted with different strings of 0’s and 1’s by varying light intensities. At the
receiving side photodiodes convert optical signals into electrical receives the data in original
form. For creating a message, switch LEDs number of times so a string of data with different
sequence is obtained.

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Chapter 4

PROPERTIES OF LED BASED DATA COMMUNICATION

Optical wireless communication through visible light has both advantages and disadvantages
over current wireless technology such as Wi-Fi. The disadvantage includes correct line of sight to
support high data rate transmission rate. If the line of sight is not proper in between transmitter
end and receiver end data transmission rate will degrade. Another restraint, visible light
communication system is essentially support short range applications. Any obstruction and
interference can affect system performance. While researchers are working effort fully to
improve performance of VLC system. VLC system has several advantages to become compliment
to rival wireless technologies. Due to small amount of radio frequency spectrum, if the traffic is
increased significantly on the network resulting complexity increases. Light itself has 10000 times
wider bandwidth than radio waves [1]. Due to which the transfer of data is more effectively
possible Radio waves are harmful for human beings as they penetrate the body and may cause
mutation. So it is safe. Since no signal penetration through walls, so nobody can hack it. Thus it
is secure to use.

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Chapter 5

WORKING
The brief description about LED based data communication is described below. Fig. 1. It consists
of a transmitter unit, free space channel and receiver unit. There are two systems that are
connected one at transmitter end and another one at receiver end for transmission and reception
of information.

Fig.1.Block diagram of LED based data communication system

The system 1 transmits data to the transmitter unit which contains transmitter circuitry with
white LEDs. On the receiving end, the receiver unit contains photodiodes and receiver circuitry.

5.1. Transmitter unit

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Theoretically, for VLC light source can be used as transmitter device. Incandescent light bulbs get
quickly damage due switched on and off regularly. Thus it is not recommended as VLC
transmitter. It is dual purpose nature i.e. communication and illumination. Due to low power
consumption and cost efficient Fluorescent light is widely used for illuminating the room.
Fluorescent lights can switch on and off quickly to transmit data.

5.2. LED Light source

White LEDs are efficient to use because they have high brightness, long life time and consume
low power. White LEDs are used in this system as they are cheaper than incandescent lamps and
fluorescent lamps. We can also use blue LEDs with yellow LEDs and colour LEDs such as red, green
and blue LEDs because their combination produces white illuminance. The data is entered in the
transmitter unit through the system 1. The white LEDs offers illumination along with
communication so the transmitter circuitry is required to handle the switching of LEDs. Now the
current data is fed to white LEDs and data is transmitted through visible light of LEDs. The
reasonable distance in which VLC can be expected used ranges up to about 5 meters.

5.3. Modulation

In order to actually send out data via LEDs, such as audio message it is necessary to modulate
these into carrier signal. In the context of visible light communication, this carrier signal consists
of light pulses sent out in short intervals.

5.4. Data

As shown in Figure 1. The data is to be transmitted to transmitter circuitry through which data is
fed to LED which drives the LED. The data is then travel through wireless channel and received
by photo detector which converts optical signal into electrical signal from uplink with frequency
of 38 kHz. The received data is then transmitted through USB to TTL communication protocol.

5.5. Receiver unit

The receiver unit is implemented using photodiodes. The photodiode detects visible light and
changes optical signals into electrical signals. Photodiodes can convert it into either in current
and voltage depending upon the mode of operation. Photodiodes are similar as general type of
semiconductor diode which exposed to light. Further data is decoded to recover original
information and pass it to system 2. The medium between transmitter and receiver is only is
optical channel no any physical connection is made between them. This system can transfer
various types of data such as text, and audio data signal.

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Chapter 6

FEATURES OF LI-FI
A. Capacity

Li-Fi provides with greater Bandwidth which is free and easy to use. It is also unlicensed. Li-Fi also
provides with greater data density compared to that of Wi-Fi. The data density is about 1000
times than Wi-Fi. This is due to less interference of light than RF waves. Due to high data density
and bandwidth the output speed is also very high.

B. Efficiency

 The system would be of low cost as it requires less number of components.

 No additional power input is required for this technology and moreover LED illumination
is already efficient.

C. Safety

It eliminates any health hazards caused by RF waves. Use of light cannot interfere with any
electronic circuitry and hence the technology is safe and non-hazardous.

D. Security

Data theft or hacking is negligible compared to Wi-Fi since the range of data transmission is
confined to a certain area and visible.

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Chapter 7

APPLICATIONS
The internet users are increasing day by day, as a result of which there is a heavy load on RF
spectrum. Li-Fi Technology reduces this load. Even the usage of LED bulbs has grown over the
years and this gives an advantage to incorporate light as a medium. Below listed are a set of
applications that can employ Li-Fi technology.

A. Smart Lightning

Any light source including street lights can be used to provide Li-Fi hotspots.

B. Communication in Electronic Gadgets

Short range data transfer with high speed can be achieved through Li-Fi in electronic gadgets.

C. Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) Communication

This is most important real time application that can be implemented using Li-Fi. Using vehicle
headlights data can be transmitted and thus vehicle to vehicle communication can be achieved.

D. Location and Positioning

Highly accurate location information can be obtained using Li-Fi.

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Chapter 8

ADVANTAGES
 Li-Fi can be used around highly inflammable areas like Petrol bunks, aircrafts etc. as there
wouldn’t be any interference with inflammable objects. It can be used for underwater
communication as light passes through almost all liquid media.
 Li-Fi provides an environment free from electromagnetic waves and thus creates a
healthy environment.
 Li-Fi technology provides safety, security, fast and efficient communication.
 The Electromagnetic free environment created by Li-Fi can be used for hospital
applications.

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Chapter 9

CONCLUSION
This report describes the characteristics and working of LED based data communication system.
LED does not cause any health hazards thus this communication through LED is safe to use. It
provides wider range of bandwidth so availability increased anyone can access service, where
light source is present. It also provides secure link due to line of sight, no any intruder standing
outside the room can hack the data. In this proposed system, the modulation and detection
methods used are easy to design and implement. Thus, the proposed system has provided all the
process for transferring data using VLC. The data is in form such as text and an audio. It also
provides secure link due to line of sight connectivity with its light source. Thus some advance
research work is required to overcome this limitation to implement this technology in practical
use.

Figure 3. Transmitter unit LED driver board

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Figure 4. Receiver unit

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[2] William Stallings, "Data and Computer Communications, Eighth Edition, Prentice Hall, 2007.

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