Researchers from Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) have developed a Visible Light Communication (VLC) system based on LED technology, reported Korea Business recently.
LEDs in the VLC system blink at a 3 million times per second to transmit, store and send digital information.
The ETRI team’s LED based VLC is capable of reaching download speeds of 3Mbps compared to current existing lighting communication technologies that are only capable of sending data at 250kbps.
VLC systems currently cannot be built into smartphones because the transmission boards are as big as name cards, but the research team from ETRI projected the board size can be reduced to fit into smartphones.
Although, existing lighting control systems do not have lighting control features, researchers believe in the future it will be possible to use the system to control the brightness of lights, send videos via wireless communications, measure various types of sensors, and remotely monitor power consumption of network transmission devices.