RainbowRow: Fast Optical Camera Communication

Thanks to the popularity of smartphones, optical camera communication (OCC) gains more and more attention from markets and research as one of the new internetworking architectures in the future. However, existing OCC modulations treat the signal from the transmitter as a single point light source, which sacrifices the spatial diversity and limits the data rate improvement. In this paper, we investigate the spatial diversity, a natural feature of camera imaging, and propose to combine spatial diversity with amplitude and spectrum diversities to boost the data rate of OCC to support high-speed applications. Based on preliminary experiments, we design and implement RainbowRow, a high-speed and robust OCC system. RainbowRow comprises a LED-based transmitter and a camera-based receiver, which is low-cost (i.e., under $100), with a flexible communication range (i.e., within 2 m), and high speed (i.e., up to 40 Kbps). To validate the RainbowRow performance, we conduct experiments on LabVIEW based platforms in different scenarios. Results show that RainbowRow can robustly recognize the optical symbols with a symbol error rate (SER) less than 0.05 and approach 40 Kbps data rate in the range of 1 m, significant improvement from less than 10 Kbps in OCC state of the art.