Can Balloons Produce Li-Fi? A Disaster Management Perspective

Abstract

Natural calamities and disasters disrupt the conventional communication setups and the wireless bandwidth becomes constrained. A safe and cost-effective solution for communication and data access in such scenarios is long needed. Light-Fidelity (Li-Fi) which promises wireless access to data at high speeds using visible light can be a good option. Visible light being safe to use for wireless access in such affected environments also provides illumination. Importantly, when a Li-Fi unit is attached to an air balloon and a network of such Li-Fi balloons are coordinated to form a Li-Fi balloon network, data can be accessed anytime and anywhere required and hence many lives can be tracked and saved. We propose this idea of a Li-Fi balloon and give an overview of its design using the Philips Li-Fi hardware. Further, we propose the concept of a balloon network and coin it with an acronym, the LiBNet. We consider the balloons to be arranged as a homogeneous Poisson point process in the LiBNet and we derive the mean co-channel interference for such an arrangement.