System architecture directions for a software-defined lighting infrastructure

Abstract

After years of development, cost-effective, energy-efficient, and long-lasting solid-state lighting technology is finally a viable alternative to incandescent and fluorescent lights. Unfortunately, the remarkable march of semiconductor technology into the lighting industry is almost entirely in the form of a substitute good-one kind of lighting technology that replaces another-but this, we argue, squanders a unique opportunity for lighting to enable a bevy of new applications. In this paper, we discuss applications in health, energy efficiency, entertainment, communications, indoor positioning, device configuration, and time synchronization. We then prototype several of the indoor applications to explore a software-defined lighting (SDL) architecture that could support them. Using our prototyped applications, we next take a primitive stab at demonstrating application coexistence, multiplexing multiple applications on a single lighting network. A major question raised by this effort is how to multiplex these various applications in a more principled manner on a shared lighting infrastructure whose primary role is illumination (implying that any human-perceptible flicker or flashing will be unacceptable). Looking ahead, we draw inspiration from software-defined networking's approach to sharing the network, and software-defined radios' approach to processing waveforms, to sketch the beginnings of an SDL architecture and its application programming interfaces. Copyright is held by the authors.