Techno-Economics of LiFi compared to Wi-Fi in Industrial IoT applications

This paper provides a techno-economical study comparing total cost of ownership (TCO) for the deployment of very dense wireless networks for new Internet of things (IoT) applications. Mobile optical wireless communication (OWC) also known as Light Fidelity (LiFi) offers unique advantages for the industrial IoT such as robustness through exclusive channel access in the unlicensed optical spectrum, lower latency, and enhanced security compared to common radio technologies like Wi-Fi or 5G. The deployment of LiFi and Wi-Fi is compared in an industrial scenario including the required fixed backbone and assuming full coverage at various wireless capacities. Six different network topologies are considered in different industrial scenarios. The comparison is performed in terms of Bill of Material, and in terms of costs. Regarding backhauling the paper shows that a fully wired topology requires higher installation costs but incurs in lower operational costs, resulting in lower total costs of ownership (TCO). Furthermore, power consumption has been identified as the cost driver for all topologies (more than 200% of the initial investments), triggering the need for power-saving techniques. Last but not least, the separation of LiFi Optical Front Ends (OFEs) and Wi-Fi access points (APs) has been identified as a critical design parameter, as shorter separation requires higher costs but reduces the cost per delivered bitrate. We discuss promising ways for the deployment of LiFi instead or in addition to Wi-Fi for very dense wireless networks demanding higher capacities than Wi-Fi can deliver in factory halls.