Life with Li- Fi

Li-Fi is a new method of delivering data that can deliver Internet access 100 times faster than traditional Wi-Fi. All you need is a standard LED bulb, an Internet connection, and a photo detector.
The term Li-Fi (Light Fidelity) was coined by pureLiFi’s CSO, Professor Harald Haas (from University of Edinburgh, Scotland) a high speed wireless access, a technology that transmits high-speed data using visible light communication (VLC) which will be 100 times faster, 10 times cheaper than its cousin Wi-Fi. “In the future we will not only have 14 billion light bulbs, we may have 14 billion Li-Fi’s deployed worldwide for a cleaner, greener, and even brighter future,” professor Harald Haas had said.
Li-Fi is a category of Optical Wireless Communications (OWC). OWC refers to transmission in the media through the use of optical carrier like infra-red (IR) and ultra-violet (UV) communications as well as visible light.
However, Li-Fi is unique in that the same visible light energy used for illumination may also be used for communication, killing two birds with a stone. Their lies the key to its success.
A LED and solar cell roles are very important in the Li-Fi concept. A principal mechanism works to receive information from light by solar cell in fluctuation of energy transmitted in light form. Transmission of data is very safe and secure by LEDs.
Data are transported by light and encoded by certain change in brightness. On the other side solar cell absorbs and converts electrical energy to digital numbers and addition to that solar cell can be used to charge mobile battery too.
Hass stunned the audience in year 2011 by demonstrating for the first time by flickering the light from a LED and transmitting data from it. The transmission of data was more than the transmission of a cellular tower.
The world is looking forward and eagerly awaiting the advent of Li-Fi, keeping its upper hand on data density, transmission, receiving power, speed – 1Gbps, security, and reduction in infrastructure and less energy consumption but of course, no denial in the fact that it has to improve in the field of range and reliability. Very soon Li-Fi and Wi-Fi will be used together to make our data transmission more efficient, fast and secure. It will be useful in petro chemicals, smart lighting, street lamps can be used as hotspots and data controls, vehicle and transportation (can prevent accidents), hospitals and aircraft cabins.
Li-Fi sounds great but when will we be able to use it in our homes and businesses? Even though Li-Fi was only a concept in 2011, it seems as if Li-Fi will become common place sooner rather than later.
Well maybe not common place, but Hass’s pureLi-Fi announced recently that it has partnered with a French industrial-lighting company and confirmed that it’ll be rolling out Li-Fi technology in its products by Q3 of 2016.
However, don’t throw away your conventional Wi-Fi router just yet, as the technology isn’t meant to replace Wi-Fi – it’s meant to work alongside it. Li-Fi doesn’t work outside, so public Wi-Fi hotspots would still need to be used, and Wi-Fi is so deeply integrated into modern society that it’d be a massive headache to replace the wireless standard.
With that being said, Haas imagines a bright future where lighting and internet access are provided via a single medium; the lightbulb.
“All we need to do is fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device and this would then combine two basic functionalities: Illumination and wireless data transmission,” Haas has said.
So, let us gear up to see a world which is illuminated and connected.
—lifestyle@timesofoman.com
The author is an ICT teacher at Indian School, Muscat