Li-Fi, or Light Fidelity, uses light as a medium of data communication.

It comes under the umbrella of Optical

Wireless Communication (OWC) that includes infrared, visible light and ultraviolet spectrum.  Li-Fi uses visible
light spectrum in the downlink and infrared spectrum in the uplink.

Li-Fi promises to achieve data rates in excess of 100Gbps.  In 2014, 10Gbps was achieved in a lab
environment.  A year later, Li-Fi achieved 224Gbps.  These rates are many times what current Wi-Fi technology
can achieve.  For this reason, Li-Fi can be categorized as gigabit communication technology.

Li-Fi is expected to complement cellular and Wi-Fi technologies, not replace them. While some proprietary Li-Fi
products exist in the market, Li-Fi has still some way to go to become standardized and mainstream.

Discussion
Why do we need Li-Fi when plenty of wireless technologies exist today?

A comparison of VLC and RF. Source: Samsung et al., 2008, slide 9.  

Among the widely deployed wireless technologies are cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. These operate in radio
frequencies less than 10GHz. This RF spectrum is getting increasingly crowded, and there's a growing demand
for more capacity and higher speeds. The visible light spectrum is an appealing alternative. Visible spectrum's
capacity is 10,000 times larger.  In fact, it's about 670THz of license-free spectrum.

Cellular can offer higher capacity by making cells smaller but this incurs heavy investment on infrastructure
such as base station equipment and transmission towers. LED lighting is becoming common worldwide and
this infrastructure can be reused for Li-Fi.  This also means that off-the-shelf components such as LEDs can be
used to keep costs down. In contrast, millimetre wave technology at 60GHz requires specialized components.

From the perspective of availability, we're often asked to turn off wireless transmitting devices in aircraft,
hospitals and other places where EMI can cause problems. Light is everywhere and there's no problem using it
in these places.  Line-of-sight and short range characteristics of Li-Fi imply better security and less co-channel
interference.

What are some use cases of Li-Fi?

Proposed use cases of Li-Fi. Source: Serafimovski et al., 2017, slide 10.  

Applications that require hundreds of Mbps throughput or microseconds of latency will benefit from Li-Fi.  In
dense urban areas, Li-Fi indoor attocells can complement cellular infrastructure.  Li-Fi can be used for cellular
or attocell backhauls.

Li-Fi can enable Augmented Reality applications. Lighting in a museum can give rich information and
interaction around exhibits. At malls, offers can be delivered via Li-Fi. Many household appliances can get
connected via Li-Fi, thus enabling the Internet of Things. Li-Fi can also be used for indoor location tracking and
navigation.  Li-Fi can enable smart wearables.

Because Li-Fi cannot get through walls, it suits applications that require high security. Only those within the
beam of the transmitter can receive data.  In environments where radio waves are considered harmful, Li-Fi
can be a safe alternative. Radio waves are easily attenuated underwater but this problem doesn't exist for Li-
Fi. Vehicle lights can be used for vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-traffic-light communication and thereby enable
autonomous driving technology.

What are some important technical details of Li-Fi?

 Spectrum: Visible spectrum is approximately in the range 400-700nm or 430-750THz.  Spectrum above
3THz is unregulated.

Bandwidth: LED BW is limited to 20MHz but system BW of 180MHz with 512 subcarriers
of DMT waveform has been possible.

Area spectral efficiency: At least 0.41 bits/s/Hz/m, which is already 1000x of RF systems.

Modulation: Simple methods such as OOK or PWM experience ISI at high data rates.

Instead, OFDM or DMT can be used to control light intensity rather than just turning LEDs on and off.
There's been significant research to make these methods unipolar. DMO-OFDM is an example.

Multiple access: OFDMA is a suitable method and it's already used in IEEE 802.11 and LTE standards. An
alternative method would be Wavelength Division Multiple Access (WDMA).

Duplexing: Wavelength Division Duplexing (WDD) is the proposed method. Visible spectrum is used for
the downlink while IR or RF spectrum is used for the uplink.

Topology: Peer-to-peer, star or broadcast.

Is Li-Fi a proprietary technology or is there a standard for it?

Possible standards for Li-Fi. Source: Serafimovski et al., 2017, slide 40.  

In 2011, IEEE Task Group (TG) 7 released the 802.15.7 standard titled "Short-Range Wireless Optical
Communication Using Visible Light".  In March 2017, IEEE Task Group 13 started looking into making a new
standard 802.15.13 titled "Multi-Gigabit/s Optical Wireless Communications".
It's been said that IEEE 802.15.7m is focusing on optical camera communications and low rate photodiode
communications while IEEE 802.15.13 is for speciality networks for industrial applications.

The IEEE 802.11 is also involved in standardizing Li-Fi to complement Wi-Fi.  This groups suggests that using
802.11 as the base would be a plus for mass deployment and to complement RF spectrum.

Meanwhile, existing Li-Fi products and their deployments must be considered as proprietary. Any attempt to
standardize Li-Fi will likely require support from patent owners.

How does Li-Fi stack up against Wi-Fi?

Wi-Fi is based on RF, which relies on electric fields to carry information. Li-Fi relies on optical intensity. RF is
complex-valued and bipolar while Li-Fi is real-values and unipolar (non-negative).

Li-Fi has the advantage over Wi-Fi in terms of capacity: 10,000 times more capacity. Visible light spectrum is
being used for lighting but not for communication yet. Hence this spectrum is free of interference.  Wi-
Fi IEEE 802.11ac has a theoretical maximum throughput of about 7Gbps  but practical values are at best
200Mbps.

LED lighting infrastructure is already installed in many places and can be reused for Li-Fi communications. The
cost of LEDs is also dropping.  Moreover, solar panels can be used as Li-Fi receivers for data sent from laser
stations or lamp posts.  Hence Li-Fi has a better proposition in terms of cost and efficiency. Li-Fi can also be
used in places such as aircraft and hospitals where EMI due to RF is usually a concern. For location-aware
services, Li-Fi may complement iBeacon.

Li-Fi can be seen as complementing Wi-Fi. Reasearch is ongoing regarding hybrid Li-Fi/Wi-Fi networks.

What are the common criticisms of Li-Fi?

Li-Fi systems need to emit and capture light, implying that they can't be used at night. IR spectrum could be
used at night but at the expense of throughput. In bright sunlight, Li-Fi systems may not work that well due to
light interference.  Li-Fi has limited range and requires line-of-sight.  However, the use of OFDM along with M-
QAM can enable non-LOS communications.  Concerns about lower LED energy efficiency when used for Li-Fi
have been dispelled.

While Harald Haas has claimed that existing lighting infrastructure can be used,  the reality is that LEDs come
in many varieties and there will be compatibility issues with Li-Fi adapters. Moreover, electrical wiring will need
to be converted to network wiring for the transmission of data.  Consumer devices will need to be replaced to
handle Li-Fi signals.
For immediate adoption, a temporary issue is that Li-Fi is not a mature technology and the standards are not
yet in place. When Li-Fi last mile is achieving hundreds of gigabits per second, backhaul infrastructure also
needs to scale equivalently. However, backhauls reaching a few terabits per second have been reported.

What are essential components of Li-Fi?

Li-Fi system overview. Source: Gupta, 2017.  

Li-Fi uses LEDs as transmitters and photodetectors/photodiodes as receivers. The former can be phosphor-
coated LEDs or RGB LEDs. For receivers, photodiodes can be p-intrinsic-n (PIN) photodiodes or avalanche
photodiodes (APD).  Off-the-shelf components can be used for these but they need to be driven by signal
processing firmware to make them communicating devices. Recent advancements include Resonant Cavity
LEDs and MicroLEDs that achieve higher data rates. LEDs have a trade-off between output power and optical
efficiency. To solve this, Laser Diodes (LD) have been proposed to target more than 100Gbps data rates.

Milestones
Aug Japanese researchers report the use of white LEDs to transmit information at 400Mbps while also serving the primary purpose of indoor lighting.

2003

Nov The Visible Light Communications Consortium (VLCC) is established, comprising of major companies in Japan. The aim is to provide communication capability through

2003
LED lightings.

OFDM is first used for VLC since the high crest factor that's usually a problem for radio communications is not an issue for VLC when intensity modulation and direct
2006 detection is used.
 Scottish Enterprise funds a project named "D-Light".  Project work begins in January 2010 at the University of Edinburgh. Project objectives mention the use of off-
2009 the-shelf LEDs to achieve 100Mbps under normal lighting, BER of 10E-4, 1-4m range and real-time signal processing. Thus, the project has a strong practical rather
than academic focus.

Jul At TEDGlobal event, Harald Haas coins the term Li-Fi, which stands for Light Fidelity. He explains four limitations with radio communications: capacity, efficiency,

2011
availability, security. He claims that Li-Fi overcomes these limitations.  A few months later, D-Light project member Gordon Povey announces that project goals have
been met with a measured data rate of 102.5Mbps.

Oct The Li-Fi Consortium is launched to promote Optical Wireless Communications (OWC). While Visible Light Communications (VLC) considers only the visible

2011
spectrum, OWC includes infrared as well.

Italian researchers achieve 1Gbps data rate using Discrete Multitone (DMT) modulation.
2012

Feb Researchers at the University of Oxford report Li-Fi speed of 224Gbps by aggregating six channels with each channel achieving 37.4Gbps.

2015

Sep Harald Haas demonstrates the use of solar cells as Li-Fi receivers while at the same time converting light energy to electrical energy.

2015

Mar Company PureLiFi claims to deliver 45Mbps with its Li-Fi products.

2017

Jul IEEE 802.11 Light Communication(LC) Topic Interest Group (TIG) publishes a report on OWC. The report points out why 802.11 may be better than alternatives that

2017
other IEEE groups have proposed.  This is an input to IEEE 802.11 Working Group (WG) for potential standardization of OWC.

References
1. Buckley, Paul. 2015. "Li-Fi achieves 224-Gbps data transmission speeds with room-scale coverage." eeNews Europe. February 19. Accessed 2017-12-16. 

2. Dimitrov, Svilen and Harald Haas. 2015. "Principles of LED Light Communications: Towards Networked Li-Fi." Cambridge University Press. First edition.

3. Gupta, Shelza. 2017. "LiFi: From Illumination To Communication." May 19. Accessed 2017-12-19.

4. Haas, Harald. 2011. "Wireless data from every light bulb." TED. July. Accessed 2017-12-16. 

5. Haas, Harald. 2015. "Forget Wi-Fi. Meet the new Li-Fi Internet." TED. September. Accessed 2017-12-16.

6. Happich, Julien. 2017. "LiFi has no impact on LEDs' lighting quality, says study." eeNews Europe. October 12. Accessed 2017-12-19. 

7. IEEE 802.15 WPAN. 2017. "Task Group 13 (TG13): Multi-Gigabit/s Optical Wireless Communications." Accessed 2017-12-16. 

8. IEEE Std 802.15.7. 2011. "IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks--Part 15.7: Short-Range Wireless Optical Communication Using Visible Light." Accessed 2017-
12-16.

9. Intel Support. 2017. "Different Wi-Fi Protocols and Data Rates." December 5. Accessed 2017-12-16. 

10. Kazemi, Hossein, Majid Safari, and Harald Haas. 2017. "A wireless backhaul solution using visible light communication for indoor Li-Fi attocell networks." IEEE International
Conference on Communications. May 21-25. pp. 1-7. Accessed 2017-12-19. 

11. Khalid, A. M., G. Cossu, R. Corsini, P. Choudhury, and E. Ciaramella. 2012. "1-Gb/s Transmission Over a Phosphorescent White LED by Using Rate-Adaptive Discrete Multitone
Modulation." IEEE Photonics Journal, vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 1465–1473, October.

12. Khan, Shabaz. 2016. "Why LiFi Can’t Make You Throw Your WiFi Router?" GreyB Services. June 28. Accessed 2017-12-19.

13. Lendino, Jamie. 2016. "What is 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and how much faster than 802.11n is it?" Extreme Tech. August 22. Accessed 2017-12-16. 

14. Li, Liangchuan, Yanzhao Lu, Ling Liu, Deyuan Chang, Zhiyu Xiao, and Yijia Wei. 2014. "20×224Gbps (56Gbaud) PDM-QPSK transmission in 50GHz grid over 3040km G.652 fiber and
EDFA only link using Soft Output Faster than Nyquist Technology." Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC). March 9-13. Accessed 2017-12-19. 

15. Li-Fi Centre. 2017. "Applications of Li-Fi." Accessed 2017-12-16. 

16. Mittal, Shubhi. 2016. "Li-Fi vs Wi-Fi vs iBeacon (BLE) technology." Beaconstac. May 10. Accessed 2017-12-19. 
 17. Nordrum, Amy. 2017. "Mobile World Congress 2017: PureLiFi Debuts New Li-Fi Luminaire and Shares Progress on Commercial Pilots." IEEE Spectrum. March 1. Accessed 2017-12-
19. 

18. Patrizio, Andy. 2017. "How Wi-Fi could get a boost from Li-Fi." Network World. August 9. Accessed 2017-12-19.

19. Planetech USA. 2016. "Li-Fi Applications in the Real World." SlideShare. May 25. Accessed 2017-12-16. 

20. Povey, Gordon. 2011a. "D-Light project hits target." Visible Light Communications. September 20. Accessed 2017-12-16.

21. Povey, Gordon. 2011b. "Li-Fi Consortium is Launched." Visible Light Communications. October 19. Accessed 2017-12-16.

22. pureLiFi. 2017. "pureLiFi: History." Accessed 2017-12-16. 

23. pureVLC. 2012. "Differences Between Radio & Visible Light Communications: A technical guide." v1.0. Accessed 2017-12-19.

24. RF Wireless World. 2017. "LiFi tutorial-LiFi network, protocol, PHY, MAC, bands, modulation." Accessed 2017-12-19. 

25. Samsung, Electronics, ETRI, VLCC, and Univ. of Oxford. 2008. "Visible Light Communication: Tutorial." IEEE802.org. March 17. Accessed 2017-12-16. 

26. Savage, Neil. 2014. "Li-Fi Gets Ready to Compete With Wi-Fi." IEEE Spectrum. November 20. Accessed 2017-12-19. 

27. Serafimovski, Nikola. 2017. "Status of IEEE 802.11 Light Communication TIG." IEEE802.org. July. Accessed 2017-12-16. 

28. Serafimovski, Nikola, Volker Jungnickel, Yeong Min Jang, and John Li Qiang. 2017. "An overview on high speed optical wireless/light communications." IEEE Mentor. 802.11-
17/0962r2. July 3. Accessed 2017-12-16. 

29. Speed Guide. 2014. "What is the actual real-life speed of wireless networks?" Accessed 2017-12-16. 

30. Tsonev, Dobroslav, Stefan Videv, and Harald Haas. 2015. "Towards a 100 Gb/s visible light wireless access network." OSA Publishing. Optics Express, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp. 1627-1637.
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31. Uysal, Murat, and Hatef Nouri. 2014. "Optical wireless communications — An emerging technology." 16th International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks (ICTON), pp.
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32. Vega, Anna. 2014. "Li-fi record data transmission of 10Gbps set using LED lights." IET Engineering and Technology. July 14. Accessed 2017-12-16. 

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Further Reading
1. Haas, Harald. 2011. "Wireless data from every light bulb." TED. July. Accessed 2017-12-16.

2. Dimitrov, Svilen and Harald Haas. 2015. "Principles of LED Light Communications: Towards Networked Li-Fi." Cambridge University Press. First edition.

3. Khan, Laif Ullah. 2017. "Visible light communication: Applications, architecture, standardization and research challenges." Digital Communications and Networks, vol. 3, issue 2, pp.
78-88, May. Accessed 2017-12-19.

4. Islim, Mohamed Sufyan and Harald Haas. 2016. "Modulation Techniques for Li⁃Fi." ZTE Communications, vol. 14, no. 2, April. Accessed 2017-12-19.

5. Happich, Julien. 2017. "LiFi has no impact on LEDs' lighting quality, says study." eeNews Europe. October 12. Accessed 2017-12-19.

6. Rai, Diwakar. 2015. "Li-Fi vs Wi-Fi." LinkedIn Pulse. November 26. Accessed 2017-12-16.

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Devopedia. 2020. "Li-Fi." Version 6, January 6. Accessed 2022-06-15. https://devopedia.org/li-fi
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