New LED light fixture could be wired into the network backbone, accomplishing ubiquitous wireless communications to any device in a room without burdening the already crowded radio-frequency bands.

Visible light communications (VLC) is being refined by industry, standards groups and well-funded government initiatives. LED lighting will account for more than a $1 billion market this year, with projected growth to about $7.3 billion by 2014, according to Strategies Unlimited (Mountain View, Calif.).The market has already prompted nearly every major electronics research organization to begin developing VLC applications.

Japan's Visible Light Communications Consortium-whose members Casio, NEC, Panasonic Electric Works, Samsung, Sharp and Toshiba as well as telecom carriers like NTT Docomo-was instrumental in stimulating the IEEE 802.15 Wireless Personal Area Network standards committee to add a ".7" effort to elevate visible light communications to the same wireless status as RF and infrared. The 802.15.7 committee just approved the current draft of the wireless VLC standard at the working group level, "but we still have a lot of comments to resolve," said Rick Roberts, a scientist at Intel Labs (Portland, Ore.) who acts as technical editor for the IEEE 802.15.7 committee.

"The stimulus for getting IEEE involved is the ubiquitous deployment of LEDs. The technology is there for illumination, but if a wireless market is going to be there too, we know from past experience that there needs to be standardization for interoperability," said Roberts.

According to Roberts, the primary objective for the 802.15.7 committee is to enforce a standard that puts illumination first and communications second. "Visible light communications is the only [wireless comms] signal you can see with the human eye, so it cannot be obtrusive," he said.