Performance Study for Indoor Visible Light Communication Systems

Abstract

The field of Optical Wireless Communications (OWC) has seen rapid development during the recent years. This growing popularity is due to several characteristics of considerable importance to consumer electronics products, such as large bandwidth that is also not having spectrum regulations imposed, low cost, and license free operation. As a branch of OWC, visible light communication (VLC) systems have their own unique advantages, with several new technologies, products and patents having been developed during since the end of last century. In this research, a VLC system for indoor application is proposed. In this work, we focus on reducing cost, and for that, we had to make appropriate selection of system’s components, e.g. modulation, coding, filtering. Our objective was to achieve acceptable bit error rate (BER) performance for indoor use, with a low cost system. Through our research we met this objective. Our designs were evaluated through computer simulations. The acquired results proved the suitability of the proposed schemes and the performance’s degree of dependency on several parameters such as distance, incidence angle and irradiance angle. A software tool was created allowing easy assessment of the communication system. It is using a user friendly GUI through which the user enters the system’s parameters and the system outputs the corresponding BER value.