Poster: Coordination of Wireless Sensor Networks using Visible Light

Wireless sensor networks are often deployed indoors where artificial lighting is present. Indoor lighting is increasingly being composed of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) that offer the ability to precisely control the intensity and the frequency of the light carrier. This can be used to coordinate wireless sensor networks (WSN). The periodic variations in the light intensity can synchronise the clocks on the sensor nodes, while the ability to modulate the light carrier enables the transmission of control information like channel assignment or transmission schedules.We present Guidelight, a simple mechanism that uses controlled fluctuations in the light intensity to coordinate sensor nodes. Guidelight can wake-up or time synchronise sensor nodes or even send small bits of control information to them. All of these have separate dedicated solutions in WSN. Guidelight aims to provide a single solution to all these problems. Our initial experiments demonstrate the ability of Guidelight to trigger sensor nodes. We demonstrate Guidelight is able to trigger sensor nodes selectively at a mean error of 21 μ s.