Concurrent illumination and communication: A survey on Visible Light Communication

Abstract

The exceptional increase in the mobile data traffic leads to over exploitation of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum making it to become overcrowded. This necessitates relying on novel technology like Visible Light Communication (VLC) which utilizes cost-effective and solid-state illuminating devices like Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). The stunning notability of enabling contemporaneous illumination and communication has driven VLC to become a revolutionary alternative to RF. This survey provides an elaborate analysis of the VLC system model, optical channel environment, modulation techniques, detailed analysis on different variants of optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OOFDM), and other modulation formats like carrier-less amplitude and phase modulation (CAP) and multi-band CAP (m-CAP) which bestows with the most feasible solution for VLC in the perspective of spectral, power and computational efficiency. In addition, multiple access schemes like orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), non orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is also the focus of this survey. Furthermore, the research advancements in enabling organic LEDs (OLEDs) and superluminescent diodes (SLDs) to penetrate the solid state lighting (SSL) industry is also highlighted. This survey provides insights about the programmable test beds facilitating real time application and signifies how VLC can be amalgamated with both the lighting infrastructure and intelligent transportation system (ITS) in smart cities. In addition, certain research challenges to be addressed is also the part of this survey.