Semi-transparent solar cells indifferent to ambient lighting for LiFi application

Abstract

Light-Fidelity (LiFi) is the communication technology, which utilizes LEDs for both illumination and data transmission with a bidirectional link. In order to enhance the users mobility for indoor or outdoor environment, it is essential to choose the most appropriate receiver. LiFi systems suffer of a lack of receiver solutions about two great LiFi problematics: the integration of the receiver into mobile devices such as smartphones and the receiver capacity to work in indoor and outdoor configurations without complexifying to the system. SunPartner Technologies develops specific semi-transparent solar cells to solve these two problematics. In this paper, we show the main results concerning the ambient lighting effects obtained by semi-transparent photovoltaic modules developed by SunPartner Technologies. In particular, we show through LiFi measurements, that we can obtain three different SNR responses to ambient lighting increase. The conventional effect is obtained when the SNR decreases with the ambient lighting increase. The unusual effect concerns the SNR increase when the ambient lighting increases. Finally, the saturation stability effects show a constant SNR level for different ambient lighting. Through this research, we designed a specific semi-transparent photovoltaic module optimized for LiFi application and we performed a demonstrator that allows streaming-video using this specific photovoltaic module.