MouseVLC: Visible Light Communications Using Mouse Sensors

This paper presents a novel Visible Light Communications (VLC) system that utilizes a low resolution LED panel as the transmitter and an image sensor that is used in a computer mouse as the receiver. The image sensor inside a mouse is a low resolution (15x15 to 30x30 pixels) and high frame rate (1K to 10K frame/s) sensor that is integrated with an image processing unit to track the movements of the surface under the mouse using an optical flow algorithm. It has very low cost and very low power consumption and thus is highly suitable for a variety of internet-of-things (IoT) applications. For example, the proposed system can be used as part of an intelligent transportation system to carry transmissions from digital signage to vehicles, or from an electronic vehicle license plate to a road-side communication unit. In our system, we encode the digital information to be transmitted in the form of a series of fast moving patterns presented on the LED panel, and the receiver can reconstruct the transmitted data from the output of the mouse sensor. Our evaluation shows that, without the use of a forward error correction code, our system can achieve a data rate of up to 74 bit/s.