Development of a visible light communication system for reducing flicker in low data rate requirement

Abstract

In visible light communication, the illumination as well as transmission of data is done using the same light source. In this paper, the problem of flicker is dealt with and an experimental setup is developed using frequency shift keying (FSK) that is much more efficient than the commonly used on-off keying (OOK). A flicker free transmission is obtained which is 62% lower than OOK. A decrease of BER by 86.8% and 85.3% compared to the later is obtained at a distance of 30 cm and 480 cm respectively. For FSK, a 10% increase in BER is found at an angle of 3° which shows considerable improvement over OOK, as the later showed the same error only at 1° (measured at 100 cm). The experimental arrangement is described in detail that would enable replication of the setup in low bit rate requirements.