Evaluating LED-Camera Communication for Drones

This work explores the idea of using LED-camera communication for drone communication. In particular, this research positions the idea of using optical wireless links using LED transmitters and camera/image sensor receivers to communicate between ground and drones and between drones. While the concept opens an opportunity for a complementary line-of-sight (LOS) technology to radio frequency (RF) wireless to enable drone communication, it also raises fundamental research questions as to the ability to communicate under harsh mobile settings inherent to drones. To this end, in this paper, we present an empirical study of LED-camera communication performance for ground-drone communication under different mobile settings or trajectories of the drone. Through a bit-error-rate (BER) metric based evaluation of the performance, we evaluate the quality of drone-ground uplink and downlink LED-communication under real-world mobile conditions. Through insights from the BER evaluation, we highlight the fundamental challenges to be addressed that limit the practicality of drone visible light communication (VLC).