Internet of Radio Light

Project Information

IoRL

Grant agreement ID: 761992

DOI

10.3030/761992

Project closed

EC signature date 8 June 2017

Start date 1 June 2017

End date 30 November 2020

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 8 604 923,75

EU contribution

€ 7 685 423,75

Coordinated by

EURESCOM-EUROPEAN INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND STRATEGIC STUDIES IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS GMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - IoRL (Internet of Radio Light)

Reporting period: 2018-07-01 to 2020-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Wireless networks in buildings suffer from congestion, interference, security and safety concerns, restricted propagation and poor in-door location accuracy. IoRL propose to address the above issues through a unique solution by marrying visible light communication with 5G mmWave solution. Thus IoRL aims to provide improved 5G services indoor providing bit rate capacities of Giga bits/sec per room of a building, latency of less than 1ms from Smart Device to building gateway and location accuracy of less than 10 cm. It is expected to achieve this whilst also considerably reducing transmission power and EMF radiation levels, so the user equipment will potentially require to consume 10 times less energy, which would result in 90% energy savings, and ten times increase in battery lifetime during use in buildings.
The above aspects are important for society, because the current compound mobile data growth rate is 53%, and is predicted to grow further due to new Digital Service Provider (DSP) markets. Such markets include factories, worksites, cities, logistics & transport and health, where the value creation lies in novel services and where service performance is critical. It is likely that most of this growth will be generated indoors since the majority of those markets operate in indoor environments, which the IoRL project directly targets.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The IoRL project has been completed succesfully. In the final period the partners continued to researching into and developing enhancements to the system, prepared for and completed the construction of the portable demonstrator at Building Research Establishment (BRE), performed measurement campaign and obtained performance results.
The technical details of enhancements to the system are described in Deliverable 3.2 “Building Network Services – Intermediate”, Deliverable 3.3 “Building Network Services – Final ”, Deliverable 4.3 “Link Level Simulation Framework Development, prototype Reference”, Deliverable 4.4 “Results of Concept RRLH Proofing Trials” Deliverable 5.3 “Consumer Product Integration and Layered Protocol Interfaces” and Deliverable 5.4 “Results of Concept UE Proofing Trials”. The preparation and deployment of the lab and field demonstrators in their environments is described in Deliverable 6.2 “Laboratory Testbeds” and Deliverable 6.3 “Building Testbeds”, and the results of the measurement campaign is described in Deliverable 6.4 “Demonstration and Evaluation of Concepts in Buildings”.
In parallel the project has also in Deliverable 7.5 ”Main Results and Exploitation Goals” identified the main results achieved that can support commercial exploitation through the identified use cases namely, Homes, Museums, Conference room, Metro/Train Station and Supermarket Scenarios, elaborated on individual partner plans on exploiting the project results
In deliverable 7.8 “Report on Standardization & Regulation Activities” the project presented the standardisation and regulation landscape related to VLC/OWC and IoRL project as well as the 5G PPP programme level activities. It explained the position of VLC/OWC technology in relation ETSI, 3GPP IEEE and ITU and the important role of Light Communications Alliance to coordinating these efforts, identified the contributions the IoRL project to promote VLC/OWC directly within ITU and indirectly to the wider research community through 5GPPP. Finally, it indicated where the results produced in the IoRL project can be found and how they point the way towards the direction of VLC research for producing a successful standard
Finally the project summarises in Deliverable 7.10 “Report on Dissemination Activities”the dissemination activities and efforts in IoRL towards creating public awareness and transferring the knowledge generated in the project to the outside world. The document presents the activities and achievements between July 1, 2019 and Nov 30, 2020, structured according to the focus groups, delivery channels used and material produced. The document presents the statistical data about activities and achievements since the start of the project.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The level of performance results that were obtained with the 5G VLC communications system indicate suitability to short range communication such as transmission to passengers on seating within an aircraft and trains. Further research is needed to increase the performance of the VLC communications system for it to be a general-purpose communications competitor to the mmWave communication system in indoor environments. Furthermore, enhancements to the PD receiver would also be required so that it has the multidirectional photo sensing properties of a fly’s eye, which could possibly be achieved using a Fresnel lens at the receiver. Location estimation experiments showed that minimum location error of 0.55 cm and 80% of all location measurement errors of less than 10 cm could be obtained with an average error is 5.28 cm and highest error is 11.94 cm.
A total bit rate of 42 Mbps was obtained using a VLC system with 10 MHz bandwidth, 4-QAM modulation and SCS=30 kHz.
The mmWave system requires just four mmWave radio heads to provide sufficient coverage for a family sized sitting room, whilst also providing sufficient numbers of mmWave radio access points to be able to measure location. The best position of these radio heads are at the four corners of the room pointing at 30 degrees from the vertical towards the centre of the room. One direction of improvement is to to use circularly polarized transmit antennas.
Results from the end-to-end experiments using the IoRL RAN Layer 1 at 3.5 GHz mmWave showed a measured latency of around 0.25 ms, which indicates that the overall end-to-end latency within the building will be well below 1 ms and for VLC has measured latency of less than 1 ms.
The project has been able to achieve 70 Mbps throughput using 100 MHz bandwidth with 4-QAM and SCS=30 kHz at mmWave in the laboratory of our partner RunEL. This would translate to 210 Mbps when using 100 MHz with 64-QAM and SCS=30 kHz. In the testbed of our partner Viavi a 310 Mbps transmission was achieved on the mmWave system with 100 MHz bandwidth, 64-QAM and SCS=30kHz
An impressive set of application and network services have been developed and tested over wireless LAN Ethernet network by the project, which can be retrofitted to the 5G IoRL RAN. These services have been reported in the 5G PPP Verticals white paper. The services range from streaming IP video to a 4K TV, through streaming two IP videos to a picture in picture Android 4K IP TV to multiplayer gaming on VR headsets such as the HTC Vive that uses a 1080×1200 pixel resolution screen per eye and demands very low latency to avoid motion sickness. The multitude of data transactions, the number of users and the data demands for VR make latency, bandwidth and throughput all critical criteria simultaneously.
An Openstack Mobile Edge Cloud (MEC) was developed on Dell 740 server, on which security, load balancing, multi-source streaming, intelligent service support and location-based data access Virtual Network Functions were developed and tested over Wireless LAN, which again can be retrofitted with the 5G IoRL RAN or other RAN solutions. The VNFs developed have been reported in the 5G PPP Verticals white paper. The resultant IoRL system has demonstrated streaming TV services over 5G VLC and mmWave at Building Research Establishment in London in August/September 2020.

IoRL in one picture