Research on Secure Debugging Interaction of Sensor Nodes Based on Visible Light Communication

When a wireless sensor node’s wireless communication fails after being deployed in an inaccessible area, the lost node cannot be repaired through a debugging interaction that relies on that communication. Visible light communication (VLC) as a supplement of radio wave communication can improve the transmission security at the physical layer due to its unidirectional propagation characteristic. Therefore, we implemented a VLC-based hybrid communication debugging system (HCDS) based on VLC using smartphone and sensor node. For the system’s downlink, the smartphone is taken as the VLC gateway and sends the debugging codes to the sensor node by the flashlight. To improve the transmission efficiency of the downlink, we also propose a new coding method for source coding and channel coding, respectively. For the source coding, we analyze the binary instructions and compress the operands using bitmask techniques. The average compression rate of the binary structure reaches 84.11%. For the channel coding, we optimize dual-header pulse interval (DH-PIM) and propose overlapped DH-PIM (ODH-PIM) by introducing a flashlight half-on state. The flashlight half-on state can improve the representation capability of individual symbols. For the uplink of HCDS, we use the onboard LED of the sensor node to transmit feedback debugging information to the smartphone. At the same time, we design a novel encoding format of DH-PIM to optimize uplink transmission. Experimental results show that the optimized uplink transmission time and BER are reduced by 10.71% and 22%, compared with the original DH-PIM.