NEWFOCUS

Love­field Wire­less has been ap­pointed as Swiss mem­ber of the man­age­ment com­mit­tee for the new Euro­pean re­search project NEWFOCUS: The new Euro­pean COST Net­work on Fu­ture Gen­er­a­tion Op­ti­cal Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Tech­nolo­gies.

Vis­i­ble Light Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (VLC) refers to a data com­mu­ni­ca­tion method that uses vis­i­ble light to trans­mit in­for­ma­tion. It op­er­ates by mod­u­lat­ing light at fre­quen­cies im­per­cep­ti­ble to the hu­man eye to carry data be­tween a trans­mit­ter and a re­ceiver. The light used for VLC typ­i­cally comes from LED bulbs, which can be switched on and off very quickly, al­low­ing for the trans­mis­sion of bi­nary data through vari­a­tions in light in­ten­sity. Since it uti­lizes the vis­i­ble light spec­trum (ap­prox­i­mately 380 to 750 nanome­ters), VLC is con­sid­ered a sub­set of Op­ti­cal Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (OWC).

One of the key ad­van­tages of VLC is its po­ten­tial for high-speed data trans­mis­sion while also pro­vid­ing il­lu­mi­na­tion. It's seen as a promis­ing tech­nol­ogy for var­i­ous ap­pli­ca­tions, in­clud­ing in­door po­si­tion­ing sys­tems, In­ter­net of Things (IoT) con­nec­tiv­ity within smart en­vi­ron­ments, and se­cure com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels, as light does not pen­e­trate through walls and thus con­fines the com­mu­ni­ca­tion to a sin­gle room or area. Ad­di­tion­ally, VLC of­fers a so­lu­tion to the in­creas­ing de­mand for wire­less band­width, as it can op­er­ate in en­vi­ron­ments where ra­dio fre­quency com­mu­ni­ca­tion is lim­ited or in­ter­fered with.

The fig­ure above shows ex­am­ple sce­nar­ios: Street lights emit­ting data to pedes­tri­ans and cars (left) and an in­tel­li­gent light source out­side of a train point­ing pas­sen­gers to their right seats, us­ing a VLC toy or ticket (right).

The de­sign of fu­ture wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­works that cope with the ever-grow­ing mo­bile data traf­fic as well as sup­port var­ied and so­phis­ti­cated ser­vices and ap­pli­ca­tions in ver­ti­cal sec­tors with a low en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact is rec­og­nized as a ma­jor tech­ni­cal chal­lenge that Euro­pean en­gi­neers face to­day. The COST Ac­tion NEWFOCUS will pro­pose so­lu­tions with the po­ten­tial to im­pact the de­sign of fu­ture wire­less net­works.

NEWFOCUS is plan­ning to carry out re­search un­der two pil­lars. The first pil­lar is on the de­vel­op­ment of OWC-based so­lu­tions ca­pa­ble of de­liv­er­ing high-speed low-power con­sump­tion, highly se­cure, and low-cost wire­less ac­cess in di­verse ap­pli­ca­tion sce­nar­ios. The de­vel­oped so­lu­tions will in par­tic­u­lar sup­port In­ter­net-of-Things (IoT) for smart en­vi­ron­ments with ap­pli­ca­tions in ver­ti­cal sec­tors. The sec­ond pil­lar con­cerns the de­vel­op­ment of flex­i­ble and ef­fi­cient back­haul/fron­thaul OWC links with low la­tency.

NEWFOCUS will also serve as a global net­work­ing plat­form through ca­pac­ity build­ing of all rel­e­vant stake­hold­ers in­clud­ing uni­ver­si­ties, re­search in­sti­tu­tions, ma­jor in­dus­try play­ers, small medium en­ter­prises, gov­ern­men­tal bod­ies and non-gov­ern­men­tal or­ga­ni­za­tions. NEWFOCUS will train ex­perts to ac­com­pany re­lated Euro­pean in­dus­tries for the stan­dard­iza­tion and com­mer­cial­iza­tion of the OWC tech­nol­ogy. NEWFOCUS is the Euro­pean COST Ac­tion CA19111.

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