Citation
Ye-Sheng Kuo, Pat Pannuto, Prabal Dutta. "System Architecture Directions for a Software-Defined Lighting Infrastructure". Workshop on Visible Light Communication Systems, ACM, 7, September, 2014.

Abstract
After years of development, cost-effective, energy-efficient, and long-lasting solid-state lighting technology is finally a viable alternative to incandescent and fluorescent lights. Unfortunately, the remarkable march of semiconductor technology into the lighting industry is almost entirely in the form of a substitute good- one kind of lighting technology that replaces another- but this, we argue, squanders a unique opportunity for lighting to enable a bevy of new applications. In this paper, we discuss applications in health, energy efficiency, entertainment, communications, indoor positioning, device configuration, and time synchronization. We then prototype several of the indoor applications to explore a software- defined lighting (SDL) architecture that could support them. We observe that many applications are possible with minimal changes to commercial LED luminaries -the addition of a transistor coupled with a microcontroller or digital logic. Other applications require more capable front ends- custom RGBW LED drivers and high-speed optical receivers, for example. This leads us to conclude that a useful exploration of the design space requires an open, experimental, and extensible platform for the luminaries, their optical interfaces, and their communication backhauls. We envision a data plane that consists of a mesh network of luminaires that route IP traffic across their optical, RF, Ethernet, and powerline car- rier interfaces, a cloudlet-managed control plane that synchronizes and coordinates nearby luminaires at the physical and link layers, and a programming interface that allows multiple applications to share the lighting infrastructure. We prototype several applications to demonstrate viability, and take a primitive stab at demonstrating application coexistence. A major question is how to multiplex these various applications in a more principled manner on a shared lighting infrastructure whose primary role is illumination (implying that any human-perceptible flicker or flashing will be unacceptable). Looking ahead, we draw inspiration from software-defined networking's approach to sharing the network, and software-defined radios' approach to processing waveforms, to build out an SDL infrastructure and its application programming interfaces.

Electronic downloads

• https://www.src.org/library/publication/p070924/. (Link to paper on SRC website.)
• http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2643164.2643166

• HTML

  Ye-Sheng Kuo, Pat Pannuto, Prabal Dutta. <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/335.html"
  >System Architecture Directions for a Software-Defined
  Lighting Infrastructure</a>, Workshop on Visible Light
  Communication Systems, ACM, 7, September, 2014.

• Plain text

  Ye-Sheng Kuo, Pat Pannuto, Prabal Dutta. "System
  Architecture Directions for a Software-Defined Lighting
  Infrastructure". Workshop on Visible Light
  Communication Systems, ACM, 7, September, 2014.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{KuoPannutoDutta14_SystemArchitectureDirectionsForSoftwareDefinedLighting,
      author = {Ye-Sheng Kuo and Pat Pannuto and Prabal Dutta},
      title = {System Architecture Directions for a
                Software-Defined Lighting Infrastructure},
      booktitle = {Workshop on Visible Light Communication Systems},
      organization = {ACM},
      day = {7},
      month = {September},
      year = {2014},
      abstract = {After years of development, cost-effective,
                energy-efficient, and long-lasting solid-state
                lighting technology is finally a viable
                alternative to incandescent and fluorescent
                lights. Unfortunately, the remarkable march of
                semiconductor technology into the lighting
                industry is almost entirely in the form of a
                substitute good- one kind of lighting technology
                that replaces another- but this, we argue,
                squanders a unique opportunity for lighting to
                enable a bevy of new applications. In this paper,
                we discuss applications in health, energy
                efficiency, entertainment, communications, indoor
                positioning, device configuration, and time
                synchronization. We then prototype several of the
                indoor applications to explore a software- defined
                lighting (SDL) architecture that could support
                them. We observe that many applications are
                possible with minimal changes to commercial LED
                luminaries -the addition of a transistor coupled
                with a microcontroller or digital logic. Other
                applications require more capable front ends-
                custom RGBW LED drivers and high-speed optical
                receivers, for example. This leads us to conclude
                that a useful exploration of the design space
                requires an open, experimental, and extensible
                platform for the luminaries, their optical
                interfaces, and their communication backhauls. We
                envision a data plane that consists of a mesh
                network of luminaires that route IP traffic across
                their optical, RF, Ethernet, and powerline car-
                rier interfaces, a cloudlet-managed control plane
                that synchronizes and coordinates nearby
                luminaires at the physical and link layers, and a
                programming interface that allows multiple
                applications to share the lighting infrastructure.
                We prototype several applications to demonstrate
                viability, and take a primitive stab at
                demonstrating application coexistence. A major
                question is how to multiplex these various
                applications in a more principled manner on a
                shared lighting infrastructure whose primary role
                is illumination (implying that any
                human-perceptible flicker or flashing will be
                unacceptable). Looking ahead, we draw inspiration
                from software-defined networking's approach to
                sharing the network, and software-defined radios'
                approach to processing waveforms, to build out an
                SDL infrastructure and its application programming
                interfaces.},
      URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/335.html}
  }
  

Posted by Barb Hoversten on 6 Jul 2014.
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