Poster: Battery-free Visible Light Sensing

ABSTRACT

We present our efforts to design the first Visible Light Sensing (VLS) system that consumes only tens of μ Ws of power to sense and communicate. Our system requires no modification to the existing light infrastructure and uses unmodulated ambient light as sensing medium. We achieve this by designing a sensing mechanism that uses solar cells to achieve sub-μWs of power consumption. Further, we devise an ultra-low power backscatter based transmission mechanism we call Scatterlight that transmits digital readings without incurring the processing and computation overhead of existing sensors. Based on these principles we build a preliminary prototype. Our initial results demonstrate its ability to sense and communicate three hand gestures at 20 μWs of power.

References

1. M Kaholokula. 2016. Reusing Ambient Light to Recognize Hand Gestures. Dartmouth college. (2016).
2. Bryce Kellogg et al. Passive wi-fi: Bringing low power to wi-fi transmissions USENIX NSDI 2016.
3. Tianxing Li et al. Human Sensing Using Visible Light Communication. ACM MOBICOM 2015.
4. Tianxing Li et al. Practical Human Sensing in the Light. In ACM MOBISYS 2016.
5. Vincent Liu et al. Ambient Backscatter: Wireless Communication out of Thin Air ACM SIGCOMM 2013.
6. Vamsi Talla et al. 2017. Battery-Free Cellphone. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. (2017).
7. Ambuj Varshney et al. 2017. LoRea: A Backscatter Architecture that achieves a long communication range ACM SenSys 2017.
8. Zixiong Wang et al. 2015. On the design of a solar-panel receiver for optical wireless communications with simultaneous energy harvesting. IEEE JSAC 2015 (2015).
9. Pengyu Zhang et al. Ekhonet: High speed ultra low-power backscatter for next generation sensors ACM MOBICOM 2014.
10. Pengyu Zhang et al. Enabling practical backscatter communication for on-body sensors ACM SIGCOMM 2016.

Index Terms

• Computer systems organization

  • Embedded and cyber-physical systems

    • Embedded systems

      • Embedded hardware

    • Sensor networks

• Hardware

  • Communication hardware, interfaces and storage

    • Sensor applications and deployments

    • Sensor devices and platforms

    • Wireless devices

  • Power and energy

    • Energy generation and storage

      • Reusable energy storage