Visible Light Communication

Abstract

This work presents a general and introductory review of visible light communication. Visible light communication or VLC refers to wireless communications using a spectral range from 380 to 780 nm for the transmission of information. This part of the optical-electromagnetic range presents some advantages to current wireless radio frequency technologies, as well as several challenges to its development and application. Different visible light communication systems have been developed for indoor, outdoor, domestic, and industrial fields where the luminaire performs two tasks: general lighting and data transmission, since this type of communication has important and valuable applications. Recently, research has been performed to improve each functional block’s performance that composes this kind of communication system. The incursion VLC poses challenges such as LED bandwidth limited by the carrier lifetime, the LED-Driver Linearity, it’s up-link; the general lighting infrastructure to the internet; and the dimming and general lighting performance. It is concluded that the incursion of Visible Light Communication into the already extended spectrum of wireless communications systems will complement and make it less harmful to our environment as international regulation has helped to improve this technology substantially.

Keywords

• Optical wireless communication
• Visible Light Communication
• VLC
• Lighting emitting diode
• photodiode
• modulation