Published Online:August 2026
Product Name:The IUP Journal of Telecommunications
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJTC010826
DOI:10.71329/IUPJTC/2026.18.3.7-26
Author Name:Aevmanya Pratap Singh
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Engineering
Download Format:PDF
Pages:7-26
Light Fidelity (LiFi) uses modulated optical carriers to complement radio-frequency connectivity in industrial environments. The paper evaluates field measurements, prototypes, network architectures, and current standards for smart factories, robotic cells, automated guided vehicles, positioning, and industrial Internet of Things (IoT). Reported benefits include immunity to electromagnetic interference, spatial reuse, and signal confinement. Principal constraints are optical blockage, ambient-light interference, metal-induced multipath, mobility management, and uncertain lifecycle cost. Evidence indicates that LiFi is currently most credible as a localized or hybrid layer, rather than a factory-wide replacement for WiFi or private 5G. Distributed MIMO, hybrid RF-optical networking, and completed IEEE opticalwireless standards improve deployment prospects, but production-scale, long-duration validation remains limited.
The transition toward Industry 4.0 has placed unprecedented demands on industrial wireless communication systems. Modern smart factories increasingly rely on distributed sensing, mobile robotics, augmented reality, and human-machine collaboration, all of which require communication links that are simultaneously low-latency, highly reliable, secure, and resilient to harsh physical conditions (Almadani et al., 2020; Danys et al., 2022). Radio-frequency (RF) wireless technologies, WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and cellular Internet of Things (IoT) variants have historically dominated this space, yet they suffer from welldocumented constraints in industrial settings: limited and congested spectrum, susceptibility to EMI from motors and generators, and severe multipath propagation caused by metallic machinery (Almadani et al., 2020; Bober et al., 2021; Danys et al., 2022).