Swarm of sensor acquisition and identification using optical wireless communication

One of the most promising remote sensing technologies for the coming years is a network of sensors. The system under consideration includes a network of sensors and a remote base-station. The base-station communicates with the sensors using optical wireless links and acquires and identifies sensors based on the unique subcarrier frequency. The sensors use active retro-reflectors to communicate with the base-station in order to make the sensor simple, cost-effective, and with minimum power consumption. The base-station employs an imaging receiver (detector matrix), in which signals arriving from different directions are detected by different pixels. The imaging receiver mitigates ambient light noise and interference between simultaneous uplink transmissions from different sensors, provided that the transmissions are imaged onto disjoint sets of pixels. Our scheme allows simultaneous acquisition and identification of a sensor in a network by an imaging receiver. A probability model of erroneous acquisition due to noise is derived.