Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ELIOT (Enhance Lighting for the Internet of Things)
Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2022-06-30
Work package 2, Use Cases and Requirements, is the foundation of the technical work in ELIoT. Initial demonstrators have been showed by the partners and LiFi uses cases have been detailed described. The most promising use cases have been chosen for the final demonstrators in order to target real industrial, office, fixed wireless access and in-home scenarios.
Work package 3, Concepts and Algorithms, is aiming at studies on system concepts and algorithms enabling secure, dynamic and high-capacity LiFi end-to-end links. Important results are a refined system concept for the different ELIoT use cases, LiFi-based indoor positioning with cm accuracy, Plastic Optical Fiber (POF) based feeder networks for the luminaries concepts for handover solutions.
Work package 4, IoT Lighting Infrastructure Innovations, is concerned with a wide variety of the underlying technologies necessary for the successful design and construction of the hardware demonstrators. Concepts initiated in Work Package 3 are translated into a demonstrator setting that can actually show their feasibility. WP4 was successfully completed and a lot of conceptual work on current and future LiFi systems was carried out. This includes, for example, the development of detailed channel models, the establishment of specifications for different LiFi use cases, work on the necessary infrastructure and the integration of LiFi into radio technologies such as 5G.
Work Package 5 looks to ensure that mass market compatible mobile devices become available for the IoT that are VLC enabled. For this, the different aspects of light communication systems are being optimized, especially in terms of power consumption. The work in WP5 includes many aspects, like fronthaul optimization for power efficiency, investigation of suitable modulation schemes, advances signal processing to address the optical wireless channel, system models for the LED and recommendation for LiFi communication standards.
Work package 6, Validation through Demonstration in Real Environments, has demonstrated new features like positioning, handover and broadband data communication in LiFi system in real environments. Several use cases for outdoor, consumer, office and industry enviroments have been demonstrated.
Another highlight is ELIOTs effectiveness to influence the directions and progress in standardization through active participation and contributions to ITU-T SG 15 (G.vlc) IEEE P802.11bb as well as in IEEE P802.15.13.
ELIOT developed new methods to use the existing infrastructure to support LiFi and other important functionalities like light-based positioning based on time-of-flight and secure multicast. The first steps towards the industrialization of such lighting infrastructure components and compatible end devices and modules have been done in ELIoT, leading to fully functional end-to-end solutions. The open architecture which has been developed in ELIoT and the ongoing standardization activities in ITU-T and IEEE will allow other stakeholders to build on the work of ELIOT and develop their own solutions.
ELIoT demonstrated LiFi solutions in the facilities of our application partners WEID, DTAG, and KPN in real scenarios and under real conditions. This strongly supports new market opportunities in the IoT through ultra-dense optical wireless connections and allows other professionals to understand the benefits and capabilities of the technology and how to use it for their purposes. Additionally, the ELIoT project performed an techno-economic analysis on the cost and performance aspects for different LiFi realizations and compared these with radio technologies. For the first time, a scientifically sound study on these aspects is publicly available. This enables companies to make informed decisions about the use of the LiFi technology. In particularly, LiFi seems well positioned to address the extreme densification (devices/m2 and Mbit/m2) foreseen for 6G applications.