MIL-STD-1553 based wireless visible light communication system

Abstract

In this article, we present a design of an MIL-STD-1553 based wireless visible light communication (VLC) system. The system is designed in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) in order to provide maximum flexibility in implementation. The design of the system consists of three major components namely, VLC front end, FPGA physical layer and firmware design and MIL-STD-1553 MAC design. The designed VLC front end achieves up to 16 Mbps speed and distance of separation of 4.5m with low cost of the self LED and photodetector components. Furthermore, a design architecture of MIL-STD-1553 based wireless VLC system is proposed which is a promising candidate for wireless avionics communications. A modification of traditional wired bus MIL-STD-1553 signaling is proposed for use with wireless VLC system and subsequently implemented in FPGA-based hardware for real-time evaluation. The entire physical layer, firmware and MAC layer are implemented in FPGA-based Xilinx's Zynq System on Chip (SoC) hardware. The design of the system is shown to have very minimal resource requirements when implemented in hardware. The real-time over-the-air performance results are obtained using over-the-air transmission and reception of data traffic through the testbed using On-Off-Keying (OOK) with Line of Sight (LOS) and SISO configuration. Finally, a small scale demonstrable experimental test setup consisting of three nodes (one BC and two RTs) is presented in this paper which is an early prototype of an OnBoard Data Handling (OBDH) in the satellite.