Modern light bulbs based on Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs)
can be used to create smart indoor environments: LED light
bulbs provide a foundation for networking using visible light
as communication medium. With Visible Light Commu-
nication (VLC), LED light bulbs installed in a room can
communicate with each other and other VLC devices (e.g.,
toys, wearables, clothing). The vision of the Internet of
Things requires that light bulbs and VLC devices communi-
cate via the Internet Protocol (IP). This paper explores how
the IP stack and other networking protocols can be hosted
on Linux-based VLC devices. The VLC link layer for Linux
consists of a VLC network driver module on top of a previ-
ously developed VLC Medium Access Control (MAC) and
Physical (PHY) layers. The network driver provides the
necessary interfaces to couple the IP networking protocols
and the VLC layers. Performance and interaction between
network driver and the existing MAC and PHY layers are
analyzed and evaluated for dierent networking topologies
and scenarios. The evaluation results suggest that the se-
lected IP stack and the proposed VLC protocols are
exible
enough to inter-operate.