SCOTLAND is at the forefront of a communications revolution as the world becomes more deeply embedded in the Internet of Things (IoT), according to an Edinburgh-based scientist.
The IoT – a phrase coined by entrepreneur Kevin Ashton in 1999 – is the network of objects (things) embedded with software and electronics to exchange data between devices and services.
Professor Harald Haas – chair of mobile communications at Edinburgh University – has been researching the transmission of electronic data using LED (light emitting diode) lighting and first demonstrated the technology to the world during a live TED Global presentation in 2011.
He calls the technology Li-fi (light fidelity) and is developing it through pureLiFi, the company he co-founded in 2012.
“I believe this is a revolution in internet technology,” Haas told The National. “And my mission is to make the world believe it as well.”
The process encodes electronic data on to everyday LED bulbs that create light through a semiconductor process, instead of heating a filament as in standard bulbs.
“An LED is a semiconductor and can react very quickly in emitting photons, so we can change the light intensity so rapidly it can’t be seen with the naked eye.
“We have found a way to encode a high-rate bitstream to the changes in intensity of the light to send very high speed data.
“Some of our latest work has shown that we can achieve 100 Gigabit per second, compared to the fastest wi-fi of seven Gigabit, so we are about 10 to 20 times faster using Li-fi.”
Li-fi is also free wherever people use LED lights. Haas said: “Wherever you see an LED light you need to think of it as a high speed data transmitter – from your kettle, your fridge, from the street light in front of your house, car headlights, traffic lights.
“This can enable the Internet of Things to make our homes smarter, to save energy using smart systems and so on.”
The potential of this technology is limitless – from domestic and social applications to healthcare and offshore safety.
Haas said: “You can implant these transmitters under the skin to gather important body data and send it out through surrounding lighting systems. This would allow doctors to monitor patients 24 hours a day. It would help get people out of hospitals earlier because we have the means to monitor them.”
PureLiFi has already caught the eye of the Scottish Government, which helped with seed funding during its start-up phase.
Haas said there was still work to do: “We have to try and make people at the highest level of the Scottish Government realise that this is an emerging industry that could be as big as the coal industry used to be by creating a high-tech hub here.
“It’s not just one or two companies – it could be an ecosystem of companies where one develops the receiver, another the transmitter, yet another the smart LED and another could look at systems integration.”
Security is always an issue with any new technology, but Haas said Li-fi was more secure than its wireless counterpart.
“Wi-fi can go through walls and other opaque objects,” he said. “Li-fi does not. If you think of a cafe with a wi-fi router, everyone can access that router and can intercept your communications if you are on the same network.
“But in that cafe, people will be sitting under different lights getting a different signal, so for someone to intercept your link they would have to be sitting very close to you and you would notice that.”
In corporate environments, users might be given general access for reception or other communal areas, but by altering the algorithm used to send and receive a signal their privileges could be raised or lowered allowing them different levels of access in different rooms.
The technology has already made an impression in the USA where the Golden State Warriors basketball team in San Francisco is testing it for its new stadium, due to open in 2018.
“In a stadium like that everybody wants access to the internet, for example to see replays of action from the game. These individualised replays are not available using wi-fi because they would use too much bandwidth. But with LEDs we can provide this bandwidth and give people what they want.”
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