Design and Experimental Evaluation Framework for A Low-Cost ESP32-Based Li-Fi System for Secure Multimedia Transmission

Author

Likith Kumar K, Rakshak G Raju, Tharunya C A

Abstract

 Light Fidelity (Li-Fi) is an optical wireless communication approach in which information is conveyed through controlled changes in light intensity. This paper describes a low-cost prototype framework built around two ESP32 development boards, an LED transmitter, a photodiode-based receiver, and a computer application for file handling. The transmitter converts data supplied by a computer into a timed optical signal, while the receiver detects the changing light and returns the recovered data to a second computer interface. The proposed software design supports packet framing, sequence numbers, error checking, acknowledgements, retransmission, and optional authenticated encryption. The same architecture can be used to investigate the transfer of text, images, audio, video, PDF documents, and other files, provided that the optical link offers enough reliable throughput for the selected file or media bitrate. The paper follows a staged test plan covering electrical bring-up, binary transmission, distance and alignment, ambient-light conditions, and file-integrity checks. No measured bit-error rate or throughput results are claimed because a complete laboratory dataset was not supplied. Instead, the manuscript identifies the measurements required to evaluate the prototype fairly and discusses hardware limits that may affect performance.

Keywords

Li-Fi; visible light communication; ESP32; optical wireless communication; photodiode; multimedia transmission; CRC; packet retransmission

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