Turning the Signal Interference into Benefits: Towards Indoor Self-Powered Visible Light Communication for IoT Devices in Industrial Radio-Hostile Environments

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) plays as the key infrastructure for various applications, e.g., smart city, smart grid, and smart manufacturing. Wireless communication is greatly limited for IoT devices due to the severe electromagnetic interference in industrial radio-hostile environments. Visible light communication (VLC) has been considered as a promising communication technique that could complement the wireless communication. Due to complex industrial environments, it is not practical to wire such scale of VLC-enabled IoT devices into the power line or replace batteries for them. To cope with this challenge, we propose to harvest the energy from electromagnetic interference signals to power the VLC for IoT devices. We achieve this goal by proposing advanced signal processing designs, new energy-efficient schemes, and seamless integration. Finally, we prototype the system on real devices, and our extensive experiments show that our system can achieve promising results.