Plugo: A Scalable Visible Light Communication System Towards Low-Cost Indoor Localization

Indoor localization is critical to many location-aware applications, however, a low-cost solution with guaranteed accuracies has not yet come. Visible Light Communication (VLC-) based localization techniques are very promising to fill this gap. In this paper, we propose Plugo, a novel VLC system with random multiple access towards low-cost indoor localization. Compared to conventional RF-based approaches that rely on dedicated wireless access points as location beacons, the proposed system has the potential to deliver better accuracies with reduced cost. Specifically, we build a handful of compact VLC-compatible LED bulbs out of low-cost off-the-shelf components (around 10 total cost for each assembly) and recover VLC signals using a cheap photodiode receiver. The basic framed slotted Additive Links On-line Hawaii Area (ALOHA) is exploited to achieve random multiple access over the shared optical medium. We show its effectiveness in beacon broadcasting by experiments, and further, demonstrate a preliminary localization result with sound accuracy by using fingerprinting-based methods in a customized testbed.