Performance evaluation of multi-gigabit indoor visible light communication system

Abstract

This paper presents a performance evaluation of a mobile multi-gigabit visible light communication (VLC) system in two different environments. The VLC channel characteristics and links were evaluated under the diverse situations of an empty room and a room with very strong shadowing effects resulting from mini cubicle offices. RGB laser diodes (LDs) were used to mitigate the low modulation bandwidth of conventional transmitters (light emitting diodes, LEDs) in the VLC system. In addition, an angle diversity receiver (ADR) was introduced to mitigate inter-symbol-interference (ISI). Furthermore, a delay adaptation technique was used to further reduce the effect of ISI and multipath dispersion. The combination of delay adaptation and ADR (DAT ADR system) added a degree of freedom to the link design, which resulted in a VLC system that has the ability to provide high data rates (i.e. 5 Gbps) in the considered harsh indoor environment. Our proposed system used a simple on-off keying (OOK) modulation format and it was able to provide data rates of 5 Gbps and a bit-error-rate (BER) of 10−3 in the worst case scenario in the considered realistic indoor environment.