Visible light backscattering with applications to the Internet of Things: State-of-the-art, challenges, and opportunities

TL;DR

This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in visible light backscatter (VLB) technology, highlighting its potential for low-power IoT applications, discussing current methods, challenges, and future research opportunities.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification and analysis of VLB techniques, their applications, and outlines open challenges and future directions in the field.

Findings

VLB enables ultra low-power passive communication for IoT.

Current VLB techniques have specific merits and limitations.

Open challenges include improving range, data rate, and integration.

Abstract

Visible light backscatter (VLB) is an innovative optical transmission paradigm to enable ultra low-power passive communication and localization for the Internet of Things (IoT), by overcoming some of the limitations of conventional (i.e., active) visible light communication (VLC) as well as active/passive radio-frequency (RF) technologies. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent research activities in the VLB field. After describing the principles of operation and the main enabling technologies, we classify the existing VLB techniques according to several features, discussing their merits and limitations. Moreover, we introduce the potential applications of VLB techniques in several IoT domains. Finally, we present the main open challenges in this area and delineate a number of future research directions