Havacılık ve Uzay Teknolojileri Dergisi (Jan 2016)
THE IMPORTANCE OF WIRELESS GREEN COMMUNICATION AND THE LED TECHNOLOGY APPLICATIONS OF VISIBLE LIGHT WIRELESS COMMUNICATION
Abstract
The developments in the communication technologies have yielded many existing and envisioned data transmission architectures such as 5G WiFi, green communication, body-in nano-communication, neutrino communication, inter-planets communication, gravitational communication. The widespread use of these promising technologies in the very near future is not out of reach anymore. From echological perspective, among these technologies, green communication known as also energy efficient communication that mitigates green house gas (CO2) emissions which is a major contributor to the climate change equation and decrease the overall energy consumption becomes vitally important for human beings. Therefore, the need for greener solutions for wireless technologies has emerged by increasing the attention of government, academia, and industry. VLC, new emerging dual-use technology has the potential of low energy consumption and allows huge, licence free bandwidth that allows low-cost broadband communication in the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band with respect to overcrowding of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum and differs from radio frequency communication in both baseband signal format and optical power constraints and also less harmful to human health compared with IR communication. Therefore being a potential research focus for all the next-generation communications and networks designers, the researchers reengineer the function of indoor lighting and address the wireless capacity challenge. However, there exist many common significant regulatory and technical challenges to be addressed for the practical realization of this new emerging technology before its widespread acceptance, such as to find a way to achieve Gb/s transmission without affecting the illumination, to obtain adequate illuminance according to various environments under power efficient dimming control schemes, to achieve enhanced lighting efficiency, to provide modulation scheme compatibility with the dimming system, mobility management, duplex communication, multipath transmission channel characteristics, outdoor communication, reliability, channel coding, network coverage and to publish timely standards. Inspired by these challenges, many researchers are currently engaged in developing innovative design paradigms to address the energy efficiency challenges of existing and envisioned VLC systems for developing green VLC solutions. In this paper, the current state-of-the-art in energy efficient visible light communication is captured. LED-based VLC applications and solid state technology researches are presented. The next generation LED technologies proposed for high-speed communication for VLC applications are discussed and challenges that has to be overcome to increase the data-rate to Gb/s speeds while optimizing the power consumption are reviewed. The objective of this survey is to provide better understanding of the potentials for green VLC systems which is currently far from being fully recognized, and to motivate the research community to further explore this timely and vital topic.
