Design and Implementation of a Tuned Analog Front-End for Extending VLC Transmission Range

Abstract

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is challenged by two main drawbacks: ambient light interference and the transmission range. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose an On Off Keying (OOK) based tuned VLC Analog Front-End (AFE) using simple and low-cost electronic circuity. The proposed VLC receiver architecture consists of a transimpedance amplifier and a fourth order Multiple Feed Back (MFB) band pass filter. The filter is designed with high gain and high-quality factor (Q) for a specified center (resonant) frequency. The system performance was measured in terms of Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) at two different resonant frequencies. Experimental results show that the proposed VLC front-end is able to extend the transmission range from 60cm to 2.2m without any form of lensing at either transmitter or receiver. The receiver also showed robustness against ambient light interference. A data rate of 20kbps over a distance of 1.8m with a bit error rate (BER) <10−9 was successfully achieved.