Executive Summary : | The global IP traffic is currently 4.8 ZB per year and is expected increase three times over the next five years. While data is transmitted to the homes increasingly using fibers, the communications at the indoor level is primarily through WiFi. The radio frequency spectrum is already getting extremely congested due to the rapidly increasing demand for bandwidth. Therefore, visible light communication (VLC), which operates at very high frequencies (greater than 200 THz) and thereby offers very high bandwidth, is considered as an important candidate of in-home and access telecommunication networks. Furthermore, VLC has the potential to use already available illumination infrastructure for communication, thus minimizing the cost and power consumption of separate communication infrastructure. The effort of using VLC for an in-home access solution started with IEEE P802.15.7 standard for short-range wireless optical communication. However, the physical layer solutions proposed in IEEE P802.15.7 are limited to 96 Mb/s and thus should be further optimized to keep pace with the ever-increasing bandwidth requirements: for example, 5G solutions already require minimum per user bitrate of 100 Mb/s or peak bitrates of 10 Gb/s, latency below 1 ms, and a density of 100 Mb/s/m2, and these requirements are very challenging.
The over-arching aim of this proposal is to increase the spectral efficiency of indoor communication networks. In this proposal, we will design indoor VLC and Radio over fiber (RoF) networks and will enable synergistic combination of both to realize Next-generation Indoor Communication Networks (NICNet).
For VLC, we will use complex modulation signals that will be generated at a central gateway (to minimize cost and complexity) and will be steered to VLC nodes by radio-over-fiber (RoF) network. We will build an optimal in-home communication technology with high-performance VLC architecture (receiver and transmitter design, coding, modulation schemes, multiplexing schemes, energy efficiency) and optimal MAC protocols and algorithms.
We will use an RoF backhaul plane with RF modulated data stream that will be routed flexibly using cascaded tunable optical transmitters and an arrayed waveguide grating to several VLC links. We will optimize the RoF link by using high optical powers, and minimizing impairments through optical and electrical techniques and digital signal processing. We will also implement a wavelength division multiplexing architecture and will minimize the nonlinearities in the fiber. We will design a control plane that will synergize the resource and will also enable seamless handovers between various VLC links or between RoF and VLC links.
NICNet architecture will address the bandwidth growth in indoor scenarios expected due to the expected explosion in the overall connectivity enabled by IoT. NICNet will develop next-generation technologies which will allow India to take global leadership in this important area. |