Comparative Analysis of Low Cost Photodetectors for Visible Light Communication

Visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as a promising supplement to radio frequency technology for secure and green wireless communication. In this paper, comparative analysis of various low cost photodetectors such as solar panel and silicon photodiode (PD) is performed to check the viability of VLC for low cost easily available commodity hardware. To check the viability of VLC in different practical scenarios, experiments are performed in dark room and in the presence of noise from sunlight and artificial light sources such as fluorescent and incandescent lamps. Experimental results indicate that PD exhibits superior performance over solar panel in terms of sharp rise and fall time. However, the bit error rate performance of solar panel is better than that of PD for the given setup.