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Li-Fi: Light fidelity-a survey

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Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC), which uses a vast unregulated and free light spectrum, has emerged to be a viable solution to overcome the spectrum crisis of radio frequency. Light fidelity (Li-Fi) is an optical networked communication in the subset of VLC to offload the mobile data traffics which offers many advantages at indoor scenario. In this article, we survey the key technologies for realizing Li-Fi and present the sate-of-the-art on each aspect, such as: indoor optical wireless channel model, the VLC modulation techniques with user satisfaction, OFDM in VLC, optical MIMO, optical spatial modulation, multiple user access, resource allocation, interference management and hybrid Li-Fi schemes. Some challenges and future work that need to be solved in the area are also described.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under Grant Nos. BK20130530 and BK2012831, the Programs of Senior Talent Foundation of Jiangsu University under Grant No. 11JDG130, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61372125 and 61102054, and Open Research Fund of National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University under Grant No. 2013D08.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Communications Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, 212013, China

    Xu Bao

  2. Institute of Information and Communication Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Guanding Yu

  3. School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, 212013, China

    Jisheng Dai

  4. National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Jisheng Dai

  5. Wireless Communication Key Laboratory of Jiangsu Province, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, 210003, China

    Xiaorong Zhu

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  1. Xu Bao
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Correspondence to Xu Bao.

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Bao, X., Yu, G., Dai, J. et al. Li-Fi: Light fidelity-a survey. Wireless Netw 21, 1879–1889 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-015-0889-0

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