Fast and Energy-Efficient Link Recovery in Visible Light Communications

This paper provides mechanisms to support fast and energy-efficient link recovery for optical communication using visible light spectrum. Visible light communication (VLC) is becoming increasingly important to support low power, Gbps data rate communications due to the recent advances in LED technology and high power consumption needed for sampling and processing Gbps data in baseband for RF communication systems. In VLC, the line of sight and high directional feature make the fast link recovery a key issue. Fast link recovery is a new challenge for reliable VLC. This paper presents fast and energy-efficient link recovery approaches for VLC local area network and peer-to-peer communications, with further enhancements for multiple communication directions and color bands. The proposed approaches can achieve link recovery timely, and save the battery life of VLC devices.