What is LIFI – Light Fidelity technology and its advantages over WIFI

From past few years researchers and engineers are working on this technology “LIFI”. They believe that with the invention of this technology we will revolutionize the data distribution, using which we can eliminate the use of WIFI and provide secured connections to the people and very high speed. In today’s blog let us understand “The light fidelity technology(LIFI) and its advantages over WIFI”.

Definition of Light Fidelity Technology (LIFI)

Light fidelity technology is used for wireless communication between the electric devices using light as the transmitting medium. LIFI is very similar to WIFI but the difference is LIFI is distributed across higher frequency bands. It has been calculated that the light fidelity frequency spectrum is 2600 times bigger than RF spectrum. The LIFI technology must operate with no packet loss eliminating interference and it will be a success in the technology.

Infrastructure and working of Light Fidelity Technology

The infrastructure of LIFI is already discovered. We can make use of LED’s to transmit the visible lights. LIFI can be operated by transmitting the data while modulating  intensity of light which is received by a photo sensitive detector. The light signal is demodulated into electronic medium. This modulation takes place in a fraction of time which cannot be observed by our naked eyes. We can use LIFI technology indoors, outdoors, with dimmed lights.

The working of LIFI is very simple but the technology is powerful. When a constant power is applied over an LED light bulb, then a constant stream of photons gets omitted from the bulb and the process is illumination. As we all know, LED bulbs are semiconductor devices so it can modulate illumination process at high speed and the photodetector can detect it easily. We can use this technology to transmit high speed information through LED light bulb.

Advantages of Light Fidelity Technology (LIFI) over WIFI

1. Very high speed as compared with WIFI
2. Can be used anywhere. Wherever there is presence of LED light, we can use the data
3. LIFI has secure wireless communications as compared to WIFI.
4. LIFI provides 100 times more data density and reduces the need to shared bandwidth which is not possible in WIFI
5. 10000 times more frequency spectrum of radio waves as compared with WIFI
6. It discards all the disadvantages of piggybacking of WIFI in LIFI
7. In LIFI there is no neighbouring interference as we face it in WIFI
8. LIFI networks are unrestricted by the radio intereference
9. We can implement this technology in hospitals, factories etc as use of LIFI does not create interference in sensitive electronics

Disadvantages of LIFI

1. It requires a light source to access the network, and it is not feasible to provide the light source everywhere.
2. LIFI technology works only in light. The light cannot penetrate through everything such as walls so the signal is restricted by physical barriers
3. There are other natural sources of light such as the sun which can interrupt in the network.
4. We need to invest lots of time and money in constructing the new infrastructure for LIFI.

Conclusion:I completely agree that LIFI will bring revolutionary impact in technology. But still keeping the disadvantages of LIFI in mind, if we try to implement this new technology, then it is not a wise choice. With the growing technologies, new ideas will emerge but we should implement only those technologies which are beneficial for everyone. If you have got any doubts then comment below.