Indoor visible light communications: Challenges and prospects

The rapid improvement in the efficiency of solid-state lighting has led to predictions that it will be the dominant source used for most indoor lighting applications in the future. At present an attractive candidate for generating white-light are blue LEDs that excite a yellow phosphor, with a resultant colour emission. Such solid state sources can be used for both illumination and communications simultaneously, offering the possibility of creating wireless broadcasting within a room or office space. In this paper we outline a typical basic configuration, and the performance available using simple modulation schemes. Unmodified LEDs typically have modulation bandwidths of several MHz, but typical lighting levels provide a communications channel with a Signal to Noise Ratios in excess of 40dB. Techniques such as equalisation can be used to improve available data rate significantly, and in this paper we outline several approaches that have the potential to offer data rates of 100Mb/s and above.