Full-duplex relay VLC in LED lighting linear system topology

Abstract

Visible light communications (VLC) with light emitting diodes (LEDs) and photodiodes enables a wide range of applications in LED lighting systems. One of the main challenges in VLC is the limited range of reliable communications, owing mainly to the non-coherent nature of optical communications and limited output power of LED luminaires. In order to enhance VLC range without compromising the network throughput, we consider full-duplex relay VLC. Specifically, we consider a basic 3-luminaire (source, relay and destination) linear system topology under amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward processing at the relay luminaire. Due to full-duplex operation at the relay luminaire, a self-interference signal component arises and is subsequently canceled out as part of the relay processing. We analyze the system performance in terms of bit error rate (BER) and show that multiple orders of magnitude improvement in BER is achieved as compared to direct link VLC under practical indoor conditions.