Evaluation of Solar Panel Bandwidth for RGB Channels in Visible Light Communication

Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging technology that uses white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to transmit information and provide illumination simultaneously. Recently, solar panels have been proposed as optical detectors at the receiver to retrieve data from light signals. However, very few studies have addressed the behavior of the solar panel bandwidth at different wavelengths. In this paper, we propose the design of a low-complexity VLC system with a red-green-blue (RGB) LED transmitter and a solar panel receiver whose bandwidth is modified using a parallel load resistor. We define a set of experiments to validate the performance of the VLC system using an RGB LED source and a solar panel as the optical receiver. The VLC systems performance is evaluated across various baud rates (4800, 9600, 19200, 38400, 57600, and 115200 bits/s) at a free space transmission distance of less than 105 cm. Our measurements indicate that the solar panels highest bandwidth is achieved with the red channel, yielding a maximum data rate of 57600 bits/s at a bit error rate (BER) of 5 103. These results are analyzed and discussed to highlight the benefits and limitations of using solar panels for VLC purposes.