News

Using Overhead Lights for Wireless Communications Promises to Substantially Increase the Capacity of Existing Wireless Networks

Published: April 5th, 2012

Figure 1

Outcome/Accomplishment

Researchers from the NSF Smart Lighting Center have demonstrated the capacity for novel energy-efficient LED lighting to provide data access networks that are complementary to existing wireless systems.  By modeling the line-of-sight characteristics of light and the capacity for light to be used to communicate data bits, LED lighting has been shown to have very high capacity for supporting wireless communications that have now become ubiquitous. Moreover, light-based wireless communications can ‘reuse’ the available lighting spectrum in very small spaces – small lighting cells that are placed at approximately 1m apart can serve independent wireless channels whereas existing wireless (WiFi) transmitters compete for available spectrum.   Center researchers demonstrated how the combination of the LED light-based cells and existing WiFi can complement each other in providing wireless access that can scale – expand to meet increasing data demand, by the addition of lighting cells and/or WiFi access points.

Impacts and benefits

With the evolution of mobile telephony and personal computing to modern smartphones and tablets has come a dramatic increase demand for wireless data delivery.  These mobile devices are readily available to render rich media delivery including video and their users are actively generating this data traffic demand, sometimes beyond the limits of the network service providers. Cisco forecasts that fixed position wireless traffic will see a 39% annual growth rate between 2010 and 2015; however the capacity of RF communication techniques has not seen comparable gains in recent years. While user demand is increasing much faster than RF capacity, we have begun to see a wireless traffic jam in the RF spectrum. Without mitigation, we are on a path of ‘data starvation’ as mobile platforms are increasingly adopted in existing applications and in emerging applications including heath care, transportation, and commerce.

The NSF Smart Lighting ERC team approached this challenge from a systems perspective – by understanding the multiple interacting demands imposed on indoor environments related to health, safety, productivity, and energy efficiency and by leveraging the skills of a diverse team of scientists and engineers in the context of lighting systems. The result is a technical solution that intersects critical societal outcomes with diverse specialized knowledge for constructing energy efficient LED-based communications.  The critical discovery reported here establishes the motivation for the implementation of a cooperative system that uses WiFi and LED lighting devices in development to provide scalable performance and operating characteristics relating to wireless communication.

Explanation and Background

The work stems from the need for additional wireless capacity due to growing demand for wireless services and applications. Two trends that come from CISCO’s Visual Network Index report show that consumer traffic will be dominated by internet video and that the majority of wireless traffic is expected to come from “fixed-position” wireless devices. Considering both of these trends, cooperative systems as proposed in this work provide enormous benefits for wireless communication. First, the asymmetric nature of the proposed system is a great fit for internet video systems which are predominantly downstream traffic. This alludes to the idea that a large percentage of wireless traffic caused by video streaming can be offloaded from the RF medium to the Visible Light Communication (VLC) channels. Additionally, the indication that most wireless traffic comes from fixed-position devices would allow a mobile user to move to a VLC hotspot and remain in place during use – hence removing much of the overhead associated with handover as a user traverses the environment.

In a cooperative system, VLC capable users benefit from higher data rates and channel reuse provided by VLC cells while the removal of congestive traffic from the RF medium provides benefits to non-VLC users. As users contend for the RF medium, the probability of a packet collision is reduced as high data rate video streams are offloaded to the VLC channels. This improves the throughput of the RF channel while adding the capacity provided by VLC channels – leading to drastic gains in aggregate throughput within the environment. We have shown through simulation that these gains are scalable with the number of VLC channels and that a cooperative system performs better than either system acting alone under static conditions.

Current research within the Smart Lighting ERC is focusing on optimal protocols for traffic distribution with considerations for mobile users and dynamic signal conditions. As a user traverses through an environment, they should dynamically connect to the network via the optimal channel. The concept of handover determines when the traffic flow from AP to user should be routed to a different channel. This can include transfer from one cell to another or between the RF and VLC channels. Simple protocols observe received signal from multiple channels and select the optimal; however the research in the ERC focuses on predictive methods that account for estimated future conditions in the handover decision. Since there is innate overhead involved in handover, predictive methods allow a system to weigh the benefit of a handover versus the overhead necessary to actually reroute traffic. When considering a mobile user, predictive handover decisions estimate a user’s motion path in order to determine when a handover is unnecessary – as in the case when a user is passing through the outer edge of a cell. Additionally, they can observe VLC signal conditions to predict whether a signal loss is due to a blocking condition or a user moving out of range of the signal. In the former it is optimal to delay the handover with the assumption that the signal will return while the latter benefits from an immediate handover as it is unlikely that the user will come back in range before the handover is complete.

By Mike Rahaim and Thomas Little

LEDs Could Lead You Right to a Discount

Published: February 15th, 2012

Monday, February 13, 2012

A startup believes combining LED technology and smart-phone apps will offer precise indoor location data.

When you go to the grocery store, chances are you find yourself hunting for at least a couple of items on your list. Wouldn’t it be easier if your smart phone could just give you turn-by-turn directions to that elusive can of tomato paste or bunch of cilantro, and maybe even offer you a discount on yogurt, too?

That’s the idea behind ByteLight, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup founded by Dan Ryan and Aaron Ganick. ByteLight aims to use LED bulbs—which will fit into standard bulb sockets—as indoor positioning tools for apps that help people navigate places such as museums, hospitals, and stores, and offer deals targeted to a person’s location.

Accurate indoor navigation is currently lacking. While GPS is good for finding your way outdoors, it doesn’t work as well inside. And technologies being used for indoor positioning, such as Wi-Fi, aren’t accurate enough, Ryan and Ganick say.

Ryan and Ganick feel confident they’re in the right space at the right time: there’s not only been a boom in location-based services, but also in smart-phone apps such as Foursquare or Shopkick that use these services. Meanwhile, LEDs are increasingly popular as replacements for traditional lightbulbs (due to their energy efficiency and long life span).

ByteLight grew out of the National Science Foundation-funded Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center at Boston University, which Ganick and Ryan, both 24, took part in as electrical engineering undergrads.

Initially, ByteLight focused on using LEDs to provide high-speed data communications—a technology referred to as Li-Fi. But Ryan and Ganick felt their technology was better suited to helping people find their way around large indoor spaces.

Here’s how it might work: you’re in a department store that has replaced a number of its traditional lightbulbs with ByteLights. The lights, flickering faster than the eye can see, would emit a signal to passing smart phones. Your phone would read the signal through its camera, which would direct the smart phone to pull up a deal offering a discount on a shirt on a nearby rack.

While Wi-Fi can only accurately determine your position indoors to within about five to 10 meters, Ryan and Ganick say, ByteLight’s technology cuts this down to less than a meter—close enough for you to easily figure out which shirt the deal is referring to.

ByteLight is working on a functioning prototype, and hopes to have the first products available within a year. Ryan and Ganick say a number of developers are working on smart-phone apps that would include the technology, which, they feel, could also work as an additional (or smarter) location-finding feature within existing apps.

The company is talking to retailers about installing its equipment in stores, too. Ryan and Ganick think businesses will warm to ByteLight because installation mainly requires buying and screwing in their lightbulbs. Once a business installs the lights, they’ll need to use a ByteLight mobile app to determine which light corresponds to which spot in their building, Ganick says. An app developer could then use that data to tag deals to different lights.

And while LED bulbs are more costly than standard lightbulbs, they’ve been falling in price. ByteLight says its bulbs will be only “marginally” more expensive than existing LEDs.

Jeffrey Grau, an analyst with digital marketing company eMarketer, believes ByteLight may be on to something. If the customers are already inside a store, showing them an exclusive offer makes it more likely they’ll buy something.

But will shoppers find ByteLight’s targeting creepy? Ryan and Ganick don’t think so. They say an app on your smart phone would be “listening” for nearby ByteLights, not the other way around. So users can control their own experience. And the LED bulbs’ positioning capabilities could help people inside a large building solve the common problem of figuring out where they are. “We want people to think about lightbulbs in an entirely new way,” Ganick says.

Written by Rachel Metz

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39685/?p1=A2

ENG Alumni Develop Indoor ‘GPS’ Through LED Lighting

Published: February 8th, 2012

From an office building in Kendal Square, two Boston University alumni have developed technology that can connect people with the businesses and environments around them through LED lighting.

Aaron Ganick and Dan Ryan , 2010 graduates of College of Engineering, will soon launch a company called ByteLight. Their startup focuses on transmitting information from LED light bulbs. While the technology remains in development, they plan to implement it into retail space and make it connect with mobile devices.

“We believe that mobile is the future of retail,” Ryan said.

Bytelight’s technology can determine the most effective display placements in stores, products and floor plans, Ryan said.

ByteLight’s LED lighting also has the potential to provide global positioning in large, indoor places such as airports, shopping malls and supermarkets, according to the January 2012 newsletter from the Institute of Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization.

Ganick and Ryan researched lighting as undergraduates in the Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center at BU, where they worked for several summers.

They said after taking a class entitled “The Business of Technology Innovation,” taught by School of Management professor Paul Levine, Ganick and Ryan started to consider pursuing entrepreneurial careers. They decided to take that route with the LED technology in 2010.

“We saw a big opportunity,” Ganick said. “Costs of LEDs were dropping and locational services were growing.”

Thomas Little, associate director of the Smart Lighting ERC, said locational lighting technology could be used for asset tracking in large indoor complexes such as hospitals and laboratories.

“It’s potentially as big an industry as outdoor location services,” he said.

ByteLight first operated out of a BU incubator and then moved to Dogpatch Labs, a venture designed to provide entrepreneurs with connections and launch startups, Ryan said.

While they hinted they may have found a lighting partner for the venture, neither one would name the potential partner, elaborate on their marketing plan or give a timeframe for an official launch.

“We’re in stealth mode,” Ganick said.

Though the specifics of ByteLight’s technology do not relate to or receive funding from BU, the venture has gotten support from BU faculty.

Babak Kia, an adjunct professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, called Ganick an engineer who “builds a better future” by fusing his technical vision and leadership skills.

“He and his team are driven by an unyielding passion to invent the future, and his startup – one of Boston’s hottest – will revolutionize indoor location in much [of] the same way as Google Maps has done for outdoor location,” Kia said in an email interview.

Little said the engineering degree at BU is designed to help students become analytical thinkers and problem solvers, which Ryan and Ganick demonstrate.

“To be successful once leaving BU requires the ability to adapt,” Little said.  “[This is] especially true in the entrepreneurial world where the problems are much more diverse.”

Little said ByteLight exemplifies how Smart Lighting ERC helps students learn how to apply their analytical skills.

“Both Aaron and Dan have demonstrated the ability to adapt quickly to changing technology,” he said.

Written by Thea Di Giammerino

http://dailyfreepress.com/2012/02/05/eng-alumni-develop-indoor-gps-through-led-lighting/

Registration Available for Smart Lighting ERC Conference

Published: January 26th, 2012

Smart Spaces: Smart Lighting ERC Industry-Academia Days 2012

February 13-14, 2012 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

Register Online

Learn more about the Smart Lighting Conference at RPI

Imagine a world where efficient, digital lighting makes us healthier and more productive, produces significant energy savings, and even provides wireless, optical access to the internet. The Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center will develop new technologies and applications to change the way society uses lighting.

Engineered Smart Lighting Systems will optically sense the environment to provide energy efficient, comfortable illumination when and where it is needed. Beyond illumination, Smart Lighting Systems will simultaneously provide high speed data access and scan for biological and biochemical hazards.

Moving Mapping Technology Indoors

Published: November 21st, 2011

By Scott Kirsner
November 20, 2011

We’ve all had the experience of trying to find a particular product in a big box store apparently devoid of employees, or roaming the aisles of a vast convention center searching for a booth. While GPS displays in our cars or mapping apps on our phones can guide us to the parking lot, once you step inside, you’re in terra incognita.

The next big nut to crack in the navigation business is “indoor positioning,’’ which can solve problems as crucial as helping a fire chief understand where firefighters are within a burning building or as mundane as leading you to an ATM in an unfamiliar airport.

A Cambridge start-up called ByteLight is working on a solution that could be as simple as screwing in a light bulb. The company was spawned by Boston University’s Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center.

ByteLight hasn’t yet filed patents, so the founders won’t be specific about its technology, but the company is planning to use LED bulbs as a kind of indoor GPS satellite system. At the heart of an LED bulb is a cluster of light-emitting microchips, which can be programmed to flicker in a certain pattern invisible to the naked eye. But that pattern, viewed by the cameras built into most cellphones, would serve as a kind of address.

If the camera could see two or three of the bulbs above, it could get a very accurate fix on where you’re standing.

“LED lights are getting less expensive every day,’’ says cofounder Dan Ryan, “and location-based services are getting more important. Those are the two trends we’re trying to leverage.’’ Ryan says the company thinks its technology could be useful in places like museums, where you might use your mobile phone to find a particular piece of art.

But the company could also build its own devices that would continually collect positioning information from LED bulbs and relay it to a central station, perhaps to keep tabs on an expensive piece of equipment in a hospital, or a robot roaming through a factory. ByteLight thinks it will be able to determine a user’s – or a robot’s – position within 1 or 2 meters.

The three-person company hasn’t yet started to seek funding. “Right now, we’re just building’’ the necessary hardware and software, says Ryan.

Point Inside, a Seattle start-up, is a bit further along. The company has 29 employees, and has raised just over $2 million. But it is taking a different approach, trying to figure out where you are by reading the radio signals from Wi-Fi networks in a store, combined with information about your movements that are generated by the built-in accelerometer sensor in most smartphones.

Point Inside marketing executive Todd Sherman says the system is accurate to about 9 meters. (That’s a long stretch of shelving, if you’re looking for a particular product.)

Meijer, a Midwestern retailer, has been using the technology in its stores, enabling shoppers to create a shopping list on their phones before they arrive, and get a customized map that will guide them to the items on it. There’s also, of course, a marketing angle.

“If you put together a shopping list,’’ says Sherman, “we can tell when you’re getting close to the store and pop up a message that says, ‘If you come in today, we have a 20 percent discount for you.’ ’’ The system can also present offers for particular products located near where you’re standing.

Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have been thinking about the challenges of indoor positioning since a warehouse fire in Worcester killed six firefighters in 1999. Getting lost in a building is one of the biggest dangers of the occupation, says WPI professor R. James Duckworth, but firefighters may not have maps – or current maps – of every structure they encounter.

WPI researchers have been developing and testing what they call the Precision Personnel Locator. It uses a small wireless device, about the size of walkie-talkie, that attaches to a firefighter’s breathing apparatus. That device communicates with two or more receivers on the firetrucks. The receivers send information about each firefighter’s location to a ruggedized laptop that would be used by the incident commander.

“On the screen, you can see a kind of breadcrumb trail of pixels,’’ says WPI professor David Cyganski. “If someone gets lost, they can be talked back.’’ The WPI research has been funded by grants from government agencies like the Department of Justice and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

High-priced, custom-built systems for fire departments or the military could come first, given the obvious benefits. But like every technology that hasn’t yet been perfected, some still have questions about how useful indoor positioning will be for the average citizen, and what business models might support it.

“There’s really no burning imperative to provide these services,’’ says Greg Stirling, a senior analyst for Opus Research in San Francisco, “though it would be nice to have them if they existed.’’ (Sort of like Wi-Fi in hotel rooms, once a luxury and now a necessity?)

Stirling also questions whether marketers will feel there’s enough value in sending consumers messages on their mobile phones to try to persuade them to buy one brand of baked beans over another. “Getting the chief marketing officer of a consumer goods company interested in the person standing in Aisle 4 is really hard,’’ he says. “Often, their goal is something that has breadth and reach and scale.’’

But indoor positioning feels inevitable to me, especially when I find myself roaming the aisles of a big box store, or trying to catch a train at an unfamiliar station. As Duckworth, the WPI professor, puts it, “GPS has really set an expectation for people: I know where I am outside, so why can’t I get the same information inside?’’

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2011/11/20/moving-mapping-technology-indoors/zptUmZ3uY6FRN82K46nPoL/story.html

Postdoctoral Research Opportunity

Published: October 17th, 2011

For start date of September 1, 2012

We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher to join the Multimedia Communications Lab (MCL) supported by our research program in optical wireless communication, networking, and immersive lighting as part of the NSF Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center.

Our research is focused on a broad set of systems topics including

  • Wireless communications
  • Networking
  • Pervasive computing
  • Networked embedded systems
  • Privacy, trust, security
  • Implementation of working systems and applications

We are particularly interested in candidates with backgrounds in (a) the PHY layer for high-speed free space optical systems, and (b) practical experience in network programming under Linux or embedded Linux; although we would be delighted to support a highly agile researcher who can adapt to any challenge in the topics on our research agenda. Candidates must be excellent communicators and be able to work in an interdisciplinary research environment; strong individually and strong as part of a team .

Send CV and statement of research objectives and plan to: Professor Tom Little

ByteLight Awarded Funded Services through U-Launch Program

Published: October 11th, 2011

ByteLight one of seven innovative cleantech companies selected for technical development, entrepreneurial advisory and incubation services

BOSTON, MA – October 5th, 2011: ByteLight has been selected for funded services through U-Launch, a US Department of Energy-funded grant-based award program that provides funded services to promising clean energy start-ups. These grant awards were offered as part of the Cleantech Open Northeast business competition. The grants will be used to assist seven Boston-area companies, including ByteLight in validating, developing and deploying innovative cleantech solutions.

ByteLight is a young BU spinoff that is developing indoor navigation, location based advertising, and interactive shopping experiences for retail spaces. GPS has played a huge role in the recent mobile device revolution, spawning many companies including FourSquare, ShopKick, SCVNGR, and Gowalla. There are a variety of competing technologies that are trying to solve the indoor positioning problem including Wi-Fi triangulation, dead reckoning, and ultrasound, however these solutions have struggled to reliably achieve sub-meter accuracies. In response, ByteLight is developing a system to turn overhead LED lights into positioning beacons used for locating smartphones indoors.

“Earlier this year, U-Launch committed to providing a minimum of $20,000 in funded services to Cleantech Open Northeast Region semifinalists,” said Eric Graham, Director of Fraunhofer CSE’s TechBridge program and administrator of U-Launch.  “But given the strong field of competitors participating in this year’s competition, we felt compelled to exceed our commitment and have awarded $89,000 in total services to seven highly qualified companies.”

“As a partner in U-Launch the MassCEC is extremely pleased with the level of competition in this year’s Cleantech Open Northeast competition,” added Patrick Cloney, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. “It’s exciting for us to support innovative cleantech companies with U-Launch funded service awards.”

“The partnership between U-Launch and the Cleantech Open is a perfect example of the kind of collaborations necessary to further innovation in clean energy,” said Peter Rothstein, President of the New England Clean Energy Council. “New England’s cleantech cluster is rich and diverse, and connecting divergent programs and resources is a top priority.”

The U-Launch program provides grants that are comprised of funded services tailored to enhance the future market and funding potential of the individual awardee, and can include:

  • Technical services provided by Fraunhofer TechBridge, including prototype development assistance, technology validation and technology feasibility studies,
  • Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) services provided by the New England Clean Energy Council, including business plan development, go-to-market strategy creation, capital requirements planning, and fund-support.
  • Incubation services supplied through the ACTIONetwork, including subsidized space and access to incubator business support services.

These awards were made possible in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy as part of its Innovation Ecosystem Development Initiative, administered by the Commercialization and Deployment Team. The purpose of the Innovation Ecosystems is to accelerate the commercialization of clean energy technologies from US university laboratories into the marketplace.

About the Cleantech Open

The Cleantech Open runs the world’s largest cleantech accelerator. Its mission is to find, fund and foster entrepreneurs with big ideas that address today’s most urgent energy, environmental and economic challenges. A 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, the Cleantech Open provides the infrastructure, expertise and strategic relationships that turn clever ideas into successful global cleantech companies. Since 2006, through its one-of-a-kind annual business competition and mentorship program, the Cleantech Open has enabled hundreds of clean-technology startups to bring their breakthrough ideas to fruition, helped alumni contestants raise over $300M, and created an estimated 2,500 green-collar jobs. Fueled by a global network of more than 1,000 volunteers and sponsors, the Cleantech Open unites the public and private sectors in a shared vision for making America’s cleantech sector a thriving economic engine. For more information, visit www.cleantechopen.org, or follow Cleantech Open on Twitter and Facebook.

About U-Launch

U-Launch was founded in 2010 with the aim of supporting clean energy technologies in their transition from the laboratory to the market, and is partially funded by a three-year, $1.1M award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Innovation Ecosystem Development Initiative. The program is administered by four leading New England cleantech organizations: the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSE), the New England Clean Energy Foundation (NECEF), the Association of CleanTech Incubators of New England (ACTION) and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC). Each member of the U-Launch team provides critical early-stage resources for start-ups and spinouts. U-Launch grants are awarded to high-potential technologies, many of which are spun out of New England-based research universities. Grants are comprised of funded services tailored to enhance the future market and funding potential of the individual awardee, and can include business model review or development, market analysis, technical feasibility studies, prototype development assistance, technology validation, executive-in-residence guidance, and incubation space.

For more information on the U-Launch partners, visit:

MassCEC – www.masscec.com | Twitter

NECEF – www.cleanenergycouncil.org/foundation | Twitter

Fraunhofer CSE – www.cse.fraunhofer.org | Twitter

ACTION – www.innovativeaction.org

Bytelight accepted to Startup Leadership Program

Published: September 9th, 2011

Aaron Gannick of Bytelight was accepted to  Startup Leadership Program for 2011, and has also made it to the semi finals for IBM’s Smartcamp taking place in Istanbul, Turkey.

Altug to Give Invited Talk at Oct ’11 IEEE Photonics Society Annual Meeting

Published: June 2nd, 2011

Hatice Altug, Assistant Professor, department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is giving an Invited Talk at the  IEEE Photonics Society Annual Meeting to be held 9-13 October in Arlington, Virginia. Her talk title is ” Plasmonic-enhanced Detectors and their Applications in Smart Lighting “  For more information about the conference please visit IEEE Photonics Society.

Professor Altug is affiliated with the NSF Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center.

BU’s ByteLight Team Selected for Highland Capital Summer Entrepreneurship Program

Published: May 2nd, 2011

The BU ByteLight team of Aaron Ganick, Daniel Ryan, Travis Rich, Schuyler Eldridge & Simon Zhang were selected from a large group of applicants to participate in the Summer@Highland 2011 program! ByteLight was one of the semifinalists in BU’s $50K New Venture Competition, showing great promise for their creation of intelligent, energy efficient lighting and networking solutions. Based out of Boston University’s Photonics Center, and with the support of the Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center, ByteLight has developed an optical communications system embedded within LED lighting. By simultaneously providing energy efficient smart lighting and high speed mobile data access, ByteLight seeks to revolutionize both the lighting and telecommunications industries.

Traditional radio frequency (RF) based cellular networks are not equipped to handle the bandwidth demands of today’s mobile consumers. To address this challenge, ByteLight’s LED based general purpose lighting solution doubles as a high speed data access point. In their vision of the world, every light is a potential source of rich media content for mobile devices. This will provide high performance mobile data access to indoor environments, an area where RF providers have struggled to penetrate and a primary medium where mobile consumers access the Internet. In addition to providing lighting and data access, LED based lighting systems offer considerable advantages in energy savings and controllability. By simple bulb replacement, LEDs can offer over 2x energy savings over traditional bulbs.

In its fourth year, the Summer@Highland program is designed for university-affiliated entrepreneurs with an early business startup interested in rapid acceleration. Some of the criteria for the program include a leadership team with vision, passion, and drive, an initiative built around a breakthrough idea that is scalable with a large addressable market opportunity and a product/service that has the potential to be highly-disruptive in its area. The BU team will receive a $15,000 stipend and be provided with a complimentary space in a Highland-affiliated office.  They will work full time on their initiative over the summer beginning in June.

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