Design and development of a portable visible-light communication transceiver for indoor wireless multimedia broadcasting

Abstract

Recent rapid progress in information and communication technologies has spurred the exponential surge in the demand for unlimited high-speed and ubiquitous broadband wireless access (BWA), resulting in severe congestion of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum and wireless traffic bottleneck. Visible-light communications (VLC) is poised to become a promising BWA candidate to resolve the existing “last mile” problems. In this paper, we propose and initiate the implementation of a low-cost portable VLC transceiver capable of indoor wireless communication and multimedia broadcasting, thus presenting an economical and cable-free solution to various multimedia applications. The proposed optical transceiver design is based upon the integration of the transmitter and receiver hardware and an interactive software module, and relies upon a microcontroller which forms the system hub to manage the data and process flows among the different block components. The interactive software module consists of a graphical user interface (GUI) and a data processing algorithm, in order to control file transmission and reception in various format and to enable realtime interaction and viewing of multimedia applications.