Quantum Dots Serve to Encrypt Data in This Novel High-Speed Li-Fi Communication System
High security and throughput up to 224Gb/s — has Wi-Fi finally met its match?
Researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) have come up with a new variant of Li-Fi, the light-based alternative to Wi-Fi — claiming to deliver up to "a hundred times" the speed of Wi-Fi while simultaneously boosting security with a quantum-dot encryption system.
"This research overcomes the limitations of existing optical communication devices and proposes a new communication platform that can both increase transmission speed and enhance security," claims Himchan Cho, KAIST professor and joint corresponding author, of the team's work. This technology, which strengthens security without additional equipment and simultaneously enables encryption and transmission, can be widely applied in various fields where security is crucial in the future."
Wi-Fi technology is based on radio waves, but Li-Fi is based on light. A number of different implementations have been tried over the years, from dedicated transmitters working outside the visible light spectrum to imperceptibly flickering overhead office lights to communicate data — but the new system developed at KAIST and KRISS comes with some hefty performance claims: data throughput as high as 224Gb/s, two orders of magnitude faster than commonly-deployed commercial Wi-Fi and on order of magnitude faster than that of the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard.
The team's work doesn't stop at increasing throughput, though: the researchers have also developed an encryption system that works in the optical transmitter itself — encrypting data through a quantum-dot permeable-electrode light-emitting triode (PeLET) hardware system at the same time as it's encoded into light. "Single-device data modulation using PeLETs provides a novel concept for on-device data encryption for next-generation, highly secure VLC [Visible Light Communication] systems," the team claims.
The team's work has been published under closed-access terms in the journal Advanced Materials; no timescale for commercialization has been provided.
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