Pre-Distortion Scheme to Enhance the Transmission Performance of Organic Photo-Detector (OPD) Based Visible Light Communication (VLC)

Abstract

Organic photo-detector (OPD) is lightweight and physically flexible. It can transform plastic or glass into smart surfaces. Visible light communication (VLC) is considered as one of the promising technologies for the future wireless communications. VLC combines the advantages of lighting and communication simultaneously. Besides, it can be deployed using existing lighting infrastructure; hence little extra cost is needed to provide this wireless communication. As the OPD has a large optical detection area, it would be interesting to employ the OPD as VLC receiver (Rx). If the OPD can be used in the VLC systems, it can benefit the Internet-of-Thing (IoT) networks by providing efficient human-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications. However, implementing VLC using OPD Rx is challenging. Due to the slow charging and discharging processes of the OPD, the optical-to-electrical response speed is limited. Besides, the OPD requires external bias to be operated. Here, we propose and demonstrate using pre-distortion scheme for pulse-amplitude-modulation (PAM) signal to a self-powered PCBM:P3HT OPD to enhance the VLC transmission performance. The operation of the self-powered PCBM:P3HT OPD is discussed. Both experiments using PAM-2 and PAM-4 (with and without pre-distortion) are evaluated. The performance, requirement and capability limitations of the pre-distortion schemes are also analyzed and discussed by using numerical simulations.