NI cDAQ based software-defined radio for visible light communication system

Abstract

With the emergence of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), Visible Light Communication (VLC) has become an emerging technology for short range data communication. In this paper, a complete VLC software defined radio (SDR) transceiver is implemented on National Instrument (NI) cDAQ modules programmed in LabVIEW/MATLAB. The transceiver design mainly consists of VLC transmitter, receiver and interfacing of cDAQ modules. The major blocks of VLC transmitter comprise Optical Code Division Multiple Access (OCDMA) to improve the signal quality. The novelty in the designed prototype is that it is capable of compensating errors over a distance of 1 meter in a brightly lit room. Over and above physical system, simulation programs are also developed to investigate the impact of line-ofsight (LOS) VLC channel. In order to investigate VLC channel, Bit-Error-Rate (BER) performance is carried out to compare the proposed system with traditional VLC system.