SeedLight: Hardening LED-to-Camera Communication with Random Linear Coding Alexis Duque1,2,3, Razvan Stanica2,3, Hervé Rivano3,2, Adrien Desportes1 October 14, 2017 1Rtone, 2Univ Lyon, INSA Lyon, CITI 3Inria 

Motivations • LED-to-Camera broadcast: attracting consummer interest • Issues cut down the communication goodput and make it unreliable: • asynchronism and high bit loss ratio • constrained PHY-SDU size • no feedback nor ACK Proposal: SeedLight, a low-overhead coding scheme designed to face the inherent packet losses in line-of-sight LED-to-Camera communication. The physical layer service data unit is generally known as a frame. To avoid any confusion with the picture frame taken by the camera, we use the term PHY-SDU. 1 

Related Works and Contributions Related Works: • CeilingCast, Hao et al. [5]: Raptor Code • Martian, Du et al. [2]: LT codes, NLOS information broadcast ⇒↗ goodput but large computational complexity + header overhead Our main contributions: • First random linear coding (RLC) for VLC and OCC. • Reduce the RLC overhead by using a pseudo-random linear coding (PRLC) method • Low code complexity ⇒ cheap MCUs. 2 

LED-to-Camera communications insight 

Color LEDs as VLC emitter Modulation design • On-Off Keying (OOK), LED ON ⇒ 1, LED OFF ⇒ 0 • Manchester line coding, to avoid LED flickering • Frequency Band 4-12 kHz Figure 1: PHY-SDU format at 8 KHz. Data Symbol 0 01 (OFF-ON) 1 10 (ON-OFF) Table 1: Manchester code 3 

Camera as VLC receiver Rolling Shutter Effect [1, 3, 7, 6, 9] ..... time pixels exposure row 1 row 2 1 0 1 0 0 4 

LOS Scenario 5 

LED-to-Camera Channel Figure 2: Frame capture time and inter-frame gap • M : camera capture time • N : inter-frame time 6 

Random Linear Coding 

Random Linear Coding concepts Random Linear Coding [4] 1. Split a message into multiples chunks of the same size 2. Create a linear dependency between them 3. Transmit chunks with loss 4. Solve the linear system created by the chunks Issues • Overhead ++ • Bytes to receive ++ • Computation/memory ++ 7 

Random Linear Coding An emitter Tx wants to send a message of G bytes to a receiver Rx, split into N blocks b1, . . . , bN encapsulated in a PHY-SDU • Tx: emitter, Rx: receiver, p: PHY-SDU payload size • G: generation size = data to send, B: uncoded blocks N: blocks number • GF(q): Galois field where q = 2γ is the field size • N coefficients of γ bits c = (c1, . . . , cN), ci ∈ GF(q), are used to generate the coding vector v by linearly combining uncoded blocks as follow: v = N ∑ i=1 (ci × bi) • Concatenate c and v ⇒ C = [c, v] ⇒ overhead = N ∗ γ bits. 8 

SeedLight Solution: coding vector replaced by a seed of a Mersenne-Twister PRNG Chunk generation method 1. Generates a seed s ∈ [0...2α] (α = number of bits of the seed) 2. Init the Mersenne-Twister PRNG [8] with s 3. Generate N coefficients with PRNG ⇒ c 4. Linearly combine the N uncoded blocks with c ⇒ v 5. Built the chunk C prepending s to v ⇒ C = [s, v]. ⇒ overhead = α vs N, e.g. 8 bits vs 50 bits SYNC PB SEQ SEED PAYLOAD PAYLOAD PHY-SDU PAYLOAD p p l 9 

SeedLight Evaluation 

Testbed Nucleo STM32L0 development board (left). Chunks are computed on a laptop and sent to the MCU to be emitted via serial BUS. Decoding has been implemented on the smartphone. 10 

Packet Loss Figure 3: Frames captured at 0, 5, 10 and 20cm 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 Distance (cm) Ratio 20bits 40bits 40bits 80bits 128bits ⇒ The seed size and the overhead ratio must be carefully choosen 11 

Chunk redundancy vs seed length and N 6 8 10 12 14 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 N=25 N=50 N=100 N=150 Seed resolution (bit) Chunk redundancy (%) ⇒ Redundancy introduced by duplicated chunks ⇒ 8 bits OK if N = 50 ⇒ 10 bits OK if N = {100, 150} 12 

Goodput vs seed length 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 P e = 0.3 P e = 0.5 P e = 0.7 Seed (bit) appended to 16 bits data Goodput (kbit/s) ⇒ No gain after certain size ⇒ 8 bits seed optimal for G=50 13 

SeedLight Goodput gain 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 throughput goodput w/ RL Coding goodput W/O RL Coding Distance (cm) Throughput (kbit/s) ⇒ 2.3 kbit/s of goodput at 5cm. Between 60% and 90% gain. 14 

Implementation discussion 

Problem statement • Coding on IoT devices: low memory and low computational capacity • Core Clock < 100 MHz • RAM < 16 Ko • Flash < 256 Ko • Should be able to run concurrently with other tasks • Is there enough volatile memory ? • Is SeedLight firmware size smaller than the MCU flash size ? 15 

Use cases and MCU modes Pre-computed mode: build N chunks then send all. RAM ++. Sequential mode: build 1 chunk then send, build 1 chunk then send ... Delay ++ Parallel mode: multi-tasking = compute a chunk when the previous one is transmitting. If the chunk computation time is larger than the transmission time, the transmission will stop during this time gap. CPU ++ 16 

Galois Field Arithmetic Choice Method Operation Memory. (1) Mult. LT 1 LK 2.22γ (2) Log. LT 3 LK + 2 BR + 1 MOD + 1 ADD 2.2γ (3) No LT γ . (2 XOR + 2 SHIFT + 1 AND) 0 • (3) large number of operations (no LTs) ⇒ avoided • (1) fast, LTs size ≥ MCU flash size ⇒ for decoding by smartphone • (2) well balanced between memory requirement and complexity for Tx ⇒ for coding by MCU ⇒ O(N2P) to produce N chunks of P symbols ⇒ O(N3 + N2P) to decode a matrix of N × (N + P) bytes 17 

Computation time on testbed 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 0 2 4 6 8 10 8 MHz 50 MHz 100 MHz Chunk TX duration Generation size G (bytes) Duration (ms) 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 Nexus 5 (24 bits chunk) Nexus 6P (24 bits chunk) Generation size G (bytes) Chunk processing duration (ms) Coding on a MCU (left). Decoding on the Nexus 5 and 6P (right). ⇒ Coding in // with modulating the LED is OK if G ≤ 150 ⇒ 30 fps / 6 chunks → smartphone decodes in real time 18 

Goodput vs implementation 5 15 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 Distance (cm) Goodputs (kbit/s) Pre-computed G=100 Parallel G=100 Sequential G=100 Pre-computed G=400 Parallel G=400 Sequential G=400 ⇒ SeedLight can be implemented even on the cheapest MCU with a minor impact on the communication performance 19 

Conclusion 

Summary • SeedLight: a RLC based lightweight erasure coding for LED-to-Camera communication • Seed replaces RLC coding header. • Increases the goodput from 1.5 to 2.5kbps vs primary packet retransmission. • Much smaller overhead vs the erasure coding scheme [10, 2] • Suitable when PHY-SDU ≤ 30 bits. • SeedLight works on low-cost MCUs 20 

Further work • Coding for Multi LEDs communications • Further reduce the code overhead • Seed transmission strategy 21 

Thank you for listening ! Questions time :) 21 

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