White Light Communication: A Design for High School Experiment

As wireless communication carrier frequencies continually increase to respond to growing bandwidth demands, from hundreds of MHz (3G/4G) to dozens of GHz (5G), it would only be logical to postulate that the next step in this technological revolution would be to move to hundreds of THz, also known as visible light. This completely alleviates the carrier frequency induced bandwidth limitations while serving as ambient lighting. In this paper, a visible light communication setup capable of moderate bitrate serial communication with interference from ambient lighting will be presented. Furthermore, this paper proposes the implementation of a similar setup as a form of hands-on experiential learning for high school and undergraduate engineering students.