White‐light visible light communications based on multiple photoluminescence of fluorescent acrylic sheets

Abstract

Abstract A novel method that converts blue light into the white‐light for illumination and provides the high‐speed visible light communication link is introduced. Typical phosphors for creating white‐light cause low bandwidths and restrictions on changing correlated colour temperatures. The proposed method deals with such issues by utilising combinations of photo‐luminescence lights from cost‐effective fluorescent acrylic sheets. Characteristics of the light generated from the proposed method show that white‐lights with various correlated colour temperatures can be straightforwardly generated whilst providing orders of magnitude higher bandwidth than that from the conventional approaches using the phosphors. A high‐speed white‐light visible light communication demonstration based on a blue laser‐diode and the fluorescent acrylic sheets is presented, showing the data‐rate of 2.16 Gb/s with a bit‐error‐rate less than 3.8 × 10−3 by using an optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing scheme.

Keywords

• phosphors
• optical links
• error statistics
• optical communication
• light emitting diodes
• fluorescence