RISA-VLC · Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Assisted VLC for battery-free IoT devices

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Assisted VLC for battery-free IoT devices

The vast development of smart communication devices for the Internet of Things (IoT) is incurring an ever-increasing demand for wireless data services and energy sources. It is expected to witness a growth of connected IoT devices in the next few years, reaching up to tens of billions. Currently, these devices rely on batteries for their operation, but battery recycling is a delicate matter that has a negative environmental impact due to their chemical components. Thus, it is reasonable to think that new wireless communication systems must comply with energy-efficiency standards, then reducing the use of batteries and the carbon footprint produced by them. Because of all this, one of the mission areas in Horizon Europe is climate-neutral and smart cities, aligned with the European Green Deal. Smart cities will leverage the next generation of wireless communication technologies that must contribute to the achievement of United Nations sustainable development goals such as sustainable cities and communities, and responsible consumption and production. The intrinsic duality of visible light communication (VLC), also known as Light Fidelity (LiFi) in its networked version, for simultaneous illumination and data transmission positions it as the perfect technology for leading the future energy efficient wireless indoor communication systems. We envision LiFi for enabling battery-free IoT devices. However, there are two fundamental limitations that impede this vision: 1) The portion of optical power reached by the receiver is a tiny amount of the transmit power. 2) LiFi-based systems strictly depend on a line-of-sight link between LED and receiver. This project titled ‘Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface - Assisted VLC for battery-free IoT devices (RISA-VLC)’ has the overarching goal of enabling the massive deployment of battery-free IoT devices by increasing communication and harvesting performance. With such purpose, RISA-VLC explores reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) for VLC with the aim of engineering the channel and augmenting the amount of received optical power in indoor LiFi systems, then eliminating the barriers for the deployment of autonomous IoT devices. This applies to scenarios such as smart home, healthcare, smart farming and Industry 4.0. RISA-VLC pursues the following objectives: O1. Identify materials that can perform as RIS at indoor LiFi scenarios and characterize their photometric parameters. O2. Provide a new mathematical channel model considering the reflective surfaces of O1. O3. Propose novel signal-processing and communication techniques to exploit the manageable proposed channel. O4. Establish guidelines for RIS-assisted wireless power transfer at LiFi scenarios, then studying the autonomy of IoT devices considering the amount of harvested power under the new proposed channel.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз