Enhance Lighting for the Internet of Things

Project Information

ELIOT

Grant agreement ID: 825651

DOI

10.3030/825651

Project closed

EC signature date 14 December 2018

Start date 1 January 2019

End date 30 June 2022

Funded under

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

Total cost

€ 7 313 322,00

EU contribution

€ 5 991 026,00

Coordinated by

FRAUNHOFER GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG EV
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ELIOT (Enhance Lighting for the Internet of Things)

Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2022-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

So far, the Internet of Things (IoT) is narrowband with no latency constraints. A wider range of applications is envisioned for industrial manufacturing, augmented reality and autonomous cars. It makes use of artificial intelligence, where compute functions will be offloaded from devices into the cloud. Accordingly, future IoT will need wireless links with high data rates, low latency and reliable connectivity despite the limited radio spectrum. Connected lighting is an interesting infrastructure for IoT services because it enables optical wireless communication (Light Fidelity - LiFi), i.e. communication using unlicensed light spectrum. LED luminaires have enough modulation bandwidth for high data rates and each luminaire can be used as a wireless access point. Networked LiFi-enhanced luminaires will add new features to build a wireless network for the IoT. The ELIoT project started from existing prototypes and developed the support for IoT services. The project integrated the lighting infrastructure with LiFi and added positioning, multicast communications and enhanced security. ELIoT demonstrated these features together with a new infrastructure in real environments like industry, office or outdoor to address multiple LiFi use cases. Moreover, one project goal was to provide an open reference architecture for the support of IoT in the lighting infrastructure, to build consensus reflecting the best architectural choices, to contribute to standardization of lighting and telecom infrastructures in IEEE and ITU-T and to provide a roadmap for IoT until 2022 and beyond. ELIoT united together Europe’s key players that cover the whole value chain, i.e. Signify (SIG) as major component and luminaire maker, Maxlinear (MXL) as chipmaker, Nokia as a leading network vendor and integrator, Weidmüller (WEID) working on industrial IoT, Deutsche Telekom (DTAG) and KPN as innovative operators, LightBee an SME for LiFi devices together with Fraunhofer HHI and Fraunhofer FOKUS as a leading research institute and two top universities from Eindhoven and Oxford.

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

Work package 1, Project Coordination, is the management and administrative work package, which is led by Fraunhofer with support of the technical manager Signify.
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.

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)

ELIOT demonstrated that stable, predictable and high data rate wireless communication is possible with light infrastructures and demonstrated this for many different applications in the fields of commercial office, consumer, industry and outdoor. This has a strong impact on how we work creating innovations in the consumer, commercial,, and industrial segments. Looking on industry, particularly considering IoT and Smart Factory visions, many application fields require strong data connectivity while being inherently mobile, e.g. autonomously moving robots that depend on high data rate connections for interacting with factory services, offloading processing tasks to the cloud, or interacting with other machines. Today’s WLAN technologies have strong limitations in industrial environments and therefore are usually not even considered for industrial usage. In ELIOT, we proved with our application partners that industrial environments can benefit from WLAN technologies, leveraging inherent advantages of light-based communication.
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.

ELIoT meeting at Weidmüller in 2019 and newly developed outdoor LiFi modules.