Power-Efficient VLC Transmitter Based on Pulse-Width Modulated DC–DC Converters and the Split of the Power

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) has gained relevance during the last few years. It consists in using high-brightness LEDs (HB-LEDs) both for lighting and transmitting information by changing the light intensity rapidly. However, there are some bottlenecks that are slowing down the deployment of this technology. One of the most important problems is that the HB-LED drivers proposed for addressing high data rates in VLC achieve poor power efficiency. Since these HB-LED drivers must be able to reproduce fast current waveforms, the use of linear power amplifiers has been adopted, which clearly damages the power efficiency of HB-LED lighting. In order to alleviate this problem, an HB-LED driver made up of two DC–DC power converters is presented in this work. One of them is responsible for performing the communication functionality by operating at high switching frequency (10 MHz), whereas the second converter fulfills the illumination functionality by ensuring a certain biasing point. The split of the power allows us to minimize the power delivered by the fast-response DC–DC power converter, which suffers from high switching losses. Thus, the overall efficiency can be maximized for each particular communication scenario and for scenarios with changing conditions (i.e., mobile transmitter and/or receiver, presence of mobile obstacles, etc.). In this sense, how the lighting level and the communication signal power affect both the power efficiency and the communication efficiency is deeply analyzed in the experimental section. The implemented prototype achieves an overall efficiency around 90%. In addition, the proposed VLC transmitter is able to reproduce a wide range of digital modulation schemes, including the preferred one for wireless communications: orthogonal frequency division multiplexing.