Illuminating white light-emitting diodes (LEDs)-enabled visible light communication (VLC), which is also known as LiFi, has attracted ever-increasing attention in recent years, due to the rapid development of solid-state lighting (SSL) technology. The LEDs in general VLC systems play a dual role of illumination and wireless communication. Compared with traditional radio frequency (RF)-based communication technologies such as WiFi, VLC is a green technology which enjoys many inherent advantages including license-free spectrum, high data rate, cost-effective front-ends, high security, electro-magnetic interference (EMI)-free operation, etc. Nevertheless, the development and deployment of high-speed and large-coverage VLC systems face many challenges, such as the small modulation bandwidth of commercially available off-the-shelf white LEDs, the limited coverage of each LED access point (i.e., optical attocell) and the inter-cell interference (ICI) in multi-cell VLC networks. This talk will first give a brief introduction about the emerging VLC technology and then several previous works we have done will be presented to address the challenges faced by current VLC systems.

Dr. Chen Chen received the B.S. and M.Eng. degrees from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China, in 2010 and 2013, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2017. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, from 2017 to 2019. He is currently a Tenured-Track Assistant Professor with the School of Microelectronics and Communication Engineering, Chongqing University, China. His research interests include visible light communications, Li-Fi, visible light positioning, optical access networks, and digital signal processing. He received the Best Paper Award from the IEEE Photonics Global Conference, in 2015, and the outstanding reviewer certificates from Elsevier Optical Fiber Technology and Digital Signal Processing, in 2017 and 2018, respectively. He was a recipient of the Publons Peer Review Award in engineering and physics, in 2018. He was also a co-recipient of the IET Optoelectronics Premium Award, in 2018.