VLC: Market and Commercialization

As an emerging technology, VLC have received great attention from the academic, research and standardization communities and industry after experiencing a decisive push due to the LED technology evolution. Nevertheless, VLC have not succeeded in gaining market’s acceptance yet therefore not making the great step for large - scale commercialization and market penetration. The major decisive factors that will allow VLC to achieve these, are the development of robust and efficient applications, the implementation of incremental commercialization strategies, how standardization activities will move forward in order to offer attractive features and functionalities and if hybrid technologies will be adequately and effectively supported in order to offer benefits to the users. If everything works out well, VLC will increasingly complement RF communications in the near future.

LED Market

Due to its dramatic improvement LED technology has started conquering the market. LED’s are used for numerous applications and are deployed in many electronic devices such as TV, mobile phones, computer monitors, cameras, advertising boards and the vast market of illumination. LED illumination is penetrating both commercial and residential sectors and according to [1] it is expected that it will dominate the general illumination market by 2020 and will be very prominent in commercial lighting due to the market’s sensitivity in cost benefits offered by LED.

Industry Diversity

VLC offer illumination and “piggyback” wireless data transmission at the same time. The other side of the coin though is that in order to cover the needs of such coexistence two different industries have to cooperate. Of course this happens successfully in many cases but in many others it results in long delays for the commercialization of the technology or ends up in complete failure. In this case lighting and mobile devices original equipment manufacturers must proceed to certain necessary modifications in their products with the corresponding side effects.

On the one hand lighting original equipment manufacturers must make certain modifications in their illumination products and the mobile devices manufacturers need to add high – speed photodiode receivers in their devices. Both sides have very good reasons for making VLC a commercially available technology. LED manufacturers are facing a double – edged sword as the lifetime of LED’s has risen above 50,000 hours. In the near future consumers will be driven in replacing their old illumination equipment thus increasing the revenue of LED manufacturers but in the long run this will result in “socket saturation”. By enabling VLC technology lighting industry will give extra motives to consumers for buying their VLC products and by differentiating them they could mitigate the market saturation and have extra revenues. Mobile devices original manufacturers can also benefit from incorporating VLC equipment to their devices by adding a competitive edge and also justifying reasonably higher sale prices.

There are two plausible scenarios for introducing VLC to the market. The first, that can also be considered more realistic, regards the category of applications that do not require extra hardware in the mobile devices. In practice all the mobile devices (or at least the vast majority of them) that are available in the market today are equipped with at least one camera. Cameras are essentially a 2-D array of LEDs which can be used for low data rate light signals detection. Such a strategy could have a positive reflection on the market thus result in larger acceptance and faster adoption of VLC technology. Of course the limited power of mobile terminals should be taken into count and mitigate that by using smart algorithms for example. In the other case mobile device manufacturers could unilaterally introduce VLC to the market through their products and applications like device – to – device pairing, file transfer, wireless docking etc. For this kind of applications new hardware must be added in mobile devices for achieving higher data rates. In such a case lighting manufacturers will immediately be driven to turn towards VLC and offer compatible products.

Indoor Positioning

Retail stores and enterprise markets are two of the markets in which LED lighting is vastly spread. These markets see their revenues decrease due to unfound products in their stores and moreover recognize potential revenue increase due to targeted product advertising (up to 70% of the sales are made at the aisle level) [2]. By adopting VLC technology and indoor positioning applications they can increase their revenues. Manufacturers can also immediately profit from this high demand, as low data rates allow to the already existing equipment in mobile devices the reception of such signals. It is expected that by 2018 the indoor positioning in the retail sector will reach $5 billion.

In March of 2013 a major supermarket in Korea orginized an event called Sale Navigation so their customers could experience a navigation in the supermarket and help them to find discounted products. For this event, LED downlight luminaires, VLC receivers on the shopping carts and smart phones were used as shown in the above figure [8].

Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) Communication

Up to date a big effort is put into vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications mainly for safety reasons. VLC can be the enabling technology for these applications. One of the obstacles in which the implementation stops at is the lack of motivation for new users to buy cars that are equipped with this technology. A minimum percentage of 10% penetration in the market is required in order for it to be functional [3]. Even if every car sold from now on bears such equipment it will take up to 2 years to reach the adequate penetration thus consumers are left with extra costs and no benefits. Two possible scenarios can help in overcoming this barrier. Either complexity of the systems is minimized resulting in cost minimization also, either a way in which the applications become functional immediately is found.

References and Sources

[1] Lighting the Way: Perspectives on the Global Lighting Market, 2nd ed., McKinsey & Company, 2012, http://www.mckinsey.com

[2] P. Connolly and D. Bonte, “Indoor Location in Retail: Where Is the Money?,” ABI Research Report, Mar. 2013, http://www.abiresearch.com/research/product/1013925-indoor-location-in-retail-where-is-themon

[3] M. Ergen, “Critical Penetration for Vehicular Networks”, IEEE Communications. Letters, vol. 14, no. 5, 2010, pp. 414–16

[4] S. Hranilovic, L. Lampe, S. Hosur, “Visible light communications: The Road to Standardization and Commercialization”, IEEE Communications Magazine, December 2013

[5] A. Jovicic, J. Li, T. Richardson, “Visible light communication: Opportunities, Challenges and the Path to Market”, IEEE Communication Magazine, December 2013

[6] L. Grobe, A. Paraskevopoulos, J. Hilt, D. Schulz, C. Kottke, V. Jungickel, K. D. Langer, “High – Speed Visible Light Communication Systems”, IEEE Communication Magazine, December 2013

[7] S. H. Yu, O. Shih, H. M. Tsai, N. Wisitpongphan, R. D. Roberts, “Smart Automotive Lighting for Vehicle Safety”, IEEE Communication Magazine, December 2013

[8] S. K. Lim, K. G. Ruling, I. Kim, I. S. Jang, “Entertainment Lighting Control Network Standardization to Support VLC Services”, IEEE Communications Magazine, December 2013