The Internet of LED: A LED-ID based Interoperability and Interconnectivity Perspective Nirzhar Saha⃰, Md. Shareef Ifthekhar, Ratan Kumar Mondal, Mohammad Arif Hosain and Yeong Min Jang † Department of Electronics Engineering, Kookmin University, Seoul, Korea Email: ⃰nizharsaha_eee@yahoo.com; † yjang@kookmin.ac.kr Abstract—The internet of LED (IoL) is a novel paradigm, proposed in this paper, where the main enabling technologies are the integration of LED identification (LED-ID) and internet technology. LED-ID is one of the promising technologies of visible light communication for identification, data transmission and illumination simultaneously. Due to the heterogeneity of two different domains, the requirements of interconnectivity between LED-ID system and the internet technologies are addressed here with varied performance expectations. The internet over VLC system is the new addition in internet of things arena for providing different kinds of smart services which are briefly introduced in this paper. We have also proposed modified MAC architecture, orthogonal latin square (OLS) based backoff scheduling, and scalable GTS allocation. Keywords—Internet; visible light communication; LED-ID, LED, IoT, OLS I. INTRODUCTION The Internet of LED (IoL) is a novel paradigm, proposed in this paper; by which devices with light emitting diode- identification (LED-ID) sensors will be able to communicate with each other as well as connect to the internet by using visible light link. LED-ID based IoL aim to provide improved service than contemporary, radio frequency identification (RFID) based internet of things (IoT). LED-ID [1-2] is a new technology similar to visible light communication (VLC), emphasizing on ID technique along with communication and illumination. The use of LEDs is increasing rapidly and we have already seen loads of application of it in smart devices (such as smart LED TV, smart-phone, tab, smart-watch, smart- glass), vehicles, illuminating infrastructures etc. The ever increasing presence of LEDs among variety of things can provide a common platform for device connectivity seamlessly, efficiently and smartly. Also the contemporary RF based sensor can be replaced with LED-ID based sensors. Therefore the term ‘IoL’ can be defined as a network of interconnected devices based on LED-ID technology which uses infra-red (IR) and visible light spectrum for identification and communication as a part of large heterogeneous architecture. Both VLC and LED-ID has garnered much interest recently, mostly because of the inability of wireless personal area network (WPAN) system to support high data rate application. It should be noted that WPAN system primarily designed for scalable and low data rate application. Recently invented smart devices are based on multimedia contents. Since multimedia contents require high data rate, current WPAN is unable to satisfy the bandwidth demand of the users. Inspired by the availability of unlicensed spectrum, as well as well as the possibility of harnessing unused hundreds of terahertz bandwidth, a new communication technology has been proposed in the IEEE standard 802.15.7 [3] using the visible light medium. This standard describes the use of visible light communication (VLC) for WPAN merging data communication and lighting application together, in order to deliver data rates sufficient enough to support audio and video multimedia services. Later, LED-ID system has been developed implementing identification technology along with communication technology. Ever growing use of LEDs and image sensors i.e. cameras in the state-of-the-art devices encourage to bring new services and applications under the terminology of IoL. There are several issues relating contemporary IoT [4], such as resource efficiency, scalability, security and full interoperability of interconnected devices with higher degree of smartness. On the other hand, LED-ID based IoL technology will be able to provide scalability, resource efficiency and interoperability. LED-ID based communication technology uses unlicensed visible light spectrum therefore it can support scalable quality of service (QoS) as well as high bandwidth. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. We present network architecture in section II. In Section III, we explain LED-ID operation for IoL. Section IV describes the modes application, followed by conclusions in Section V. II. REFERENCE NETWORK ARCHITECTURE A. Network Architecture of IoL IoL is generally thinking to be a network integrating the optical wireless communication (OWC) with internet based information services based on the OWC infrastructures. Note that both IR and VLC spectrum can be used for identification and communication. A simplified IoL network architecture has shown in the fig.1, where the indoor VLC network is essentially a heterogeneous network where a central machine home gateway (HGW) is managing the whole network and connects the home network to the outside word (e.g. internet). In typical VLC network, the devices are connected to the coordinator through LED based transmitter and power line communication (PLC) [5] is considered for connecting with the other network. Here the gateway connects with the internet using the backbone transport network (wired or wireless). Nevertheless, wired connection will be the one of the This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (No. 201305792).