The term Li-Fi was coined by pureLiFi’s CSO, Professor Harald Haas, and refers to visible light communications (VLC) technology that delivers a high-speed, bidirectional networked, mobile communications in a similar manner as Wi-Fi.
The Golden State Warriors basketball team will open a new high-tech sports and entertainment complex in San Francisco in 2018, containting Li-Fi technology that was developed by Professor Harald Haas.
High spectral efficiency is the holy grail of wireless networks due to the well-known scarcity of radio spectrum. The successive introduction of advanced communication techniques enabled by the massive increases in processing power over the last few decades has enabled a progressive rise in link spectral efficiency, which in emerging systems seems to be approaching its limits.
The spectrum crunch is a global phenomenon, where wireless networks constrained by scarce spectrum resource cannot keep pace with the explosion in mobile broadband use, particularly at a time when smartphones and tablets are becoming even more prevalent and heavily used. Every new opportunity has to be maximally exploited to cope with this spectrum deficit and meet the demands of explosive broadband usage by pushing more data through existing spectrum. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), an advanced antenna technology only developed in 2010 offers one such opportunity.
High spectral efficiency is the holy grail of wireless networks due to the well-known scarcity of radio spectrum. While up to recently there seemed to be no way out of the apparent end of the road in spectral efficiency growth, the emerging approach of Network Coding has cast new light in the spectral efficiency prospects of wireless networks [1]. Initial results have demonstrated that the use of network coding increases the spectral efficiency up to 50% [2, 3]. Such a significant performance gain is crucial for many important bandwidth-hungry applications such as broadband cellular systems, wireless sensor networks, underwater communication scenarios, etc.
This research network would bring together key research groups that are in the vanguard of developing novel technologies and algorithms for spectrally efficient generation wireless networks in the UK and India.
The proposed work in this EPSRC Fellowship is aimed at providing radical new solutions to this fundamental and far reaching challenge. A key pillar of the proposed work is the extension of the RF spectrum to include the infrared as well as the visible light spectra. The recent advancements in light emitting diode (LED) device technology now seems to let the vision of using light for high speed wireless communications become a reality.
