OnionCode: Enabling Multi-priority Coding in LED-based Optical Camera Communications

Optical camera communication (OCC) has attracted increasing attention recently thanks to the wide usage of LED and high-resolution cameras. The lens-image sensor structure enables the camera distinguish light from various source, which is ideal for spatial MIMO. Hence, OCC can be applied to several emerging application scenarios, such as vehicle and drone communications. However, distance is a major bottleneck for OCC system, because the increase in distance makes it difficult for the camera to distinguish adjacent LEDs, which we call LED spatial mixing.In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical coding scheme named as OnionCode to support dynamic range of channel capacity in one-to-many OCC scenario. OnionCode adopts a multi-priority receiving scheme, i.e., the receivers can dynamically discard the low-priority bit streams according to the measured channel capacity. OnionCode achieves this based on a key insight that, the luminance level of a mix-LED is distinguishable. We prototype a LED-based OCC system to evaluate the efficacy of OnionCode and the results show that OnionCode achieves a higher coding efficiency and overall throughput compared with the existing hierarchical coding.