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

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.