Enabling Multiple Access for Non-Line-of-Sight Light-to-Camera Communications

TL;DR

HYCACO is a novel non-line-of-sight light-to-camera communication system that enables multiple LEDs to communicate through reflected signals using a standard camera, achieving higher throughput and robustness in complex indoor environments.

Contribution

The paper introduces HYCACO, a new NLoS LCC system that supports multiple LEDs with a standard camera, improving robustness and throughput over existing systems.

Findings

Achieves 4.5 kbps throughput on iPhone 6s with three transmitters.

Demonstrates robustness in complex indoor luminous environments.

Utilizes rolling shutter mechanism for optimal performance.

Abstract

Light-to-Camera Communications (LCC) have emerged as a new wireless communication technology with great potential to benefit a broad range of applications. However, the existing LCC systems either require cameras directly facing to the lights or can only communicate over a single link, resulting in low throughputs and being fragile to ambient illuminant interference. We present HYCACO, a novel LCC system, which enables multiple light emitting diodes (LEDs) with an unaltered camera to communicate via the non-line-of-sight (NLoS) links. Different from other NLoS LCC systems, the proposed scheme is resilient to the complex indoor luminous environment. HYCACO can decode the messages by exploring the mixed reflected optical signals transmitted from multiple LEDs. By further exploiting the rolling shutter mechanism, we present the optimal optical frequencies and camera exposure duration selection strategy to achieve the best performance. We built a hardware prototype to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme under different application scenarios. The experimental results show that the system throughput reaches 4.5 kbps on iPhone 6s with three transmitters. With the robustness, improved system throughput and ease of use, HYCACO has great potentials to be used in a wide range of applications such as advertising, tagging objects, and device certifications.