Line-of-sight visible light communication system design and demonstration

Abstract

With the emergence of high lumen output white lighting LEDs, visible light communication has become an intriguing technology to realize low cost data transmission in conjunction with lighting. In this paper, we discuss some key issues in practical line-of-sight (LOS) visible light communication system design. They include a transmitter, channel model, and receiver front-end. A transmitter containing white LED arrays should be designed to achieve required lighting distribution and reliable data transmission at the same time. A basic LOS channel model to characterize the path loss and received optical power is also needed for optimization of the receiver under major noise sources. Finally we show a practical indoor LOS visible light communication system to demonstrate some of our analyses.