The demonstration of wireless access via visible light communications

Abstract

Wireless data transmission via visible light has been significantly explored with the development of white-LED. In this paper, we report a wireless access system via visible light communication (VLC) technology. In our demonstration, the custom-made USB board serves as the transceiver consisting of a LED-based transmitter and a photodiode-based receiver. Two USB boards are connected to two computers respectively, constructing a communication system. One computer, or an ARM development board being linked to the network acts as a router enables computer to have access to Internet via the visible light channel. The prototype demonstrates a transmission data rate up to 460800 baud without packet loss at a distance of 30cm. A 0.3W white LED is used and a 10-6 bit error ratio (BER) is achieved. The eye diagram performance of the VLC system is presented as well as the packet loss of the visible light link.