A VLC-based system for optical SPR sensing facility

Abstract

In this work, bit error rate (BER) measurements of visible light communications (VLC) systems are introduced as an effective possible replacement of reflectivity measurements in a conventional optical plasmonic sensing procedure. In particular, we investigate a procedure where we exploit the phenomenon of the variations of BER values of the VLC systems with the sensed concentration of contaminations in the sensing medium. We consider a system composed of a VLC white LED source that transmits data through the sensing medium, which is then detected by a receiver and the BER values are computed. Our analysis proves that the information extracted from the BER measurements is sufficient to learn about the sensing medium and hence can replace conventional measurement techniques used in optical sensing. Thus, a simpler procedure of optical sensing is proposed due to the low cost of the proposed system and its flexibility in sensing medium in different environment scenarios. In this work, the proposed idea is verified for optical SPR sensors for their high impact state-of-art performance over other conventional optical sensors. Moreover, the VLC-based system is shown to have no negative effect on the performance of the designed optical SPR sensor in a way that undermines its operation.