The demand for high-speed, secure wireless communication is escalating, particularly in high-density environments like urban areas, and critical sectors such as healthcare and defense. Traditional Wi-Fi struggles with issues like signal congestion, electromagnetic interference, and security vulnerabilities, compromising connectivity quality. LiFi is much more suitable for areas like hospitals which contain equipment highly sensitive to electromagnetic interference, has a high bandwidth far away from standard radio waves which enables strong communication in highly congested areas.
We developed a small scale, low-cost LiFi system to demonstrate a proof of concept of LiFi that grants the user full access to the internet. While a small number of companies have production LiFi to buy, it’s typically very expensive, and any proof-of-concept projects we’ve seen aren’t fast enough, or don’t have the software, to enable internet access. We used two Raspberry Pi computers to accomplish this, with one acting as a gateway connected to an internet network and the other as a client, connected with LiFi to the gateway. We were able to achieve a very slow internet access of 0.06 Mbps with this circuitry by using UART with a baud rate of 115,200 to communicate a Point-To-Point through a modulating LED and phototransistor circuit. We predicted a maximum of 16Mbps communication speed, but fell short due to the low intensity of the LEDs compared to the surrounding area, as well as the relatively low speed of UART. While this speed is painfully slow for web browsing, we were able to run an internet speed test through Chromium, and the system is more suited for lower-intensity network applications, such as SSHing into the Raspberry Pi from another internet-connected device, or pinging an ip address
