Why the Next Generation of Wireless Devices Needs LiFi
June 19, 2019
The world is at a turning point in connectivity. LiFi is the platform for a new digital age powered by billions of connections through light. As more people, devices and services compete for limited radio spectrum — 3G, 4G, 5G, WiFi, Bluetooth, digital radio, 4K TV, etc. — we are quickly running out of spectrum. Nokia Bell Labs predicts that the world’s demand for wireless data will be unmet by 30% by 2020.
Broadly, experts predict that within 20 years radio will only be able to cover 5%-10% of the expected demand for mobile data. According to Ericsson, mobile data is growing at 60% per year to 71 exabytes per month — or 71 billion, billion bytes— by 2021. Around 90% percent of mobile data will be consumed indoors by 2022, and connected devices in our homes are forecast to balloon from 10 today to 50 in just 5 years.
A solution?
Imagine a world where high-speed connectivity is as pervasive as the lights in our ceilings, our streets and our homes. Imagine billions of lights connecting billions of smart devices unlocking unprecedented productivity, autonomy and fuelling the next generation of high bandwidth disruptive applications such as autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, edge computing and augmented reality.
LiFi is ready
While LiFi brings significant advantages over incumbent wireless technologies, it is also designed to complement them both on the access side and when integrated into smart devices.
In a mixed wireless network environment such as 5G, LiFi can offer by far the greatest bandwidth even as it co-exists with cellular and WiFi. LiFi can add massive capacity and support a greater quality of service, for future 5G networks.
LiFi, cellular and WiFi could even be used simultaneously for even greater bandwidth.
Standardization
pureLiFi chairs the task group which is standardizing LiFi as 802.11bb alongside WiFi, with the goal of ensuring similarity of operation between the two tehnologies.
Integrating LiFi
An integrated LiFi connectivity solution is made up of two main blocks:
- baseband, which converts data into a signal to be transmitted, and vice versa
- optical front end (OFE), operates like a “light antenna” analogous to the radio chain in an RF system like cellular or WiFi
The optical front end is where the magic of LiFi happens. The OFE acts like a light antenna, capturing and transmitting light to turn light into data, and data into light.
LiFi can be integrating into smart devices by pairing a pureLiFi OFE with an existing baseband.
Gbps optical front end + industry 802.11 baseband device
For smart devices of the near future, the pureLiFi Gbps OFE offers exceptional performance in a tiny package, ready to be paired with an 802.11 baseband.
The OFE can operate with a standard 802.11 baseband, making integration much simpler. We’ve already demonstrated our OFE enabling downlink line rates of >1Gbps and uplink rates of <600Mbps.
While our novel LiFi OFE operates with standard 802.11 baseband solutions, pureLiFi are also open to partnering with other baseband technology vendors to build unique LiFi chipset solutions.
Unleashing innovation
LiFi has the high bandwidth, high speed, low latency and security to support today’s most demanding use cases and to help you invent the use cases of tomorrow.
- Smart home. LiFi in the home will enable simple, secure, reliable and robust wireless communications. LiFi also enhances the quality of service as it prevents interference and creates high quality connectivity. LiFi can offer data aggregation and wireless offloading. Smart homes can be truly wireless, and users can intuitively understand the best coverage locations by seeing the light.
- Device to device communication. Not all communication needs to — or maybe even should — travel via the internet or a local network. LiFi can be used for lightning fast device to device communication that is reliable, sure and interference free. This could be mobile to mobile or any device to any device.
- Media and game streaming. Media streaming can overwhelm home networks. That doesn’t just mean that your video buffers or stutters. Everyone in the house will suffer lower performance of their wireless connections. As game streaming becomes widespread, the impact will only become greater. LiFi offloads streaming to ensure a fast, reliable connection while everyone in the house enjoys full bandwidth.
- Virtual, augmented and mixed reality. LiFi offers faster speeds, lower latency and interference free wireless communications that helps overcome technology challenges allowing VR and AR products to become wire free and reliable. LiFi also offers more accurate localization enhancing tracking and geolocation services.
This article was first published online by purelifi
