Networking in the Light

Abstract

Mobile computing is accelerating beyond the smartphone era. The advent of new wearables (e.g., Google Glass, Samsung smart watch, Fitbit) and health sensors (e.g., biometric sensors printed onto the skin) is placing significant new demands on the already limited radio spectrum. Within the next two years, the volume of data from mobile devices will surpass all data generated by wired networks. To stave off the radio spectrum crunch, there is a need for radically different thinking.

In this talk, I will discuss the potential of using visible light spectrum to mitigate the radio spectrum crunch problem. Operating on the 400THz - 800THz unregulated frequency band, visible light spectrum offers 10,000 times more bandwidth than the total radio spectrum, and many other unique benefits. I will first describe our recent effort on enabling unobtrusive communication between screens/displays and cameras, a special form of Visible Light Communication (VLC). Without using any coded images, our system creates a hidden channel to interconnect screens and cameras, and to transmit dynamic data on the fly using off-the- shelf smart devices. I will also discuss our vision on leveraging VLC to build the next- generation smart spaces, and new networking and systems challenges it brings.

Bio

Xia Zhou is an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College, co-directing the Dartmouth Networking and Ubiquitous Systems (DartNets) Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2013 at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and completed the M.S. in Computer Science in 2007 at Peking University. Her research interests lie in mobile systems, wireless networking, and dynamic spectrum access. Her recent research focuses on visible light communication systems and mobile sensing systems. She is a recipient of the Google Faculty Research Award in 2014. Her recent work won the Best Paper Award in the first ACM Workshop on Visible Light Communication Systems (VLCS) in 2014 and the Best Paper Award Nominee in UbiComp 2014. Her prior work on dynamic spectrum access won the Best Practical Paper Award in SIGMETRICS 2013 and Best Paper Award Finalist in MobiCom 2008.