OWIND

A wide range of applications is envisioned for industrial manufacturing, involving artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and flexible production adjustments for individual products. Accordingly, future manufacturing will necessitate wireless links with high data rates, low latency and reliable connectivity. Optical wireless communication (OWC, also known as Li-fi) is a wireless communication technology using the unlicensed light spectrum. LED luminaires have enough modulation bandwidth for high data rates and each luminaire can be used as a wireless access point. Networked OWC-enhanced luminaires will add new features to build a wireless network for the industrial production.

OWIND measures and models the multilink optical wireless channel, develops a signal model comprising different modulation formats, optical transmitters with intensity modulation, and photo-receivers with direct detection. Coordination of the optical wireless network with mutually overlapping small cells is studied for the support of mobile users at high data rates and network features such as soft handover are investigated.