Development and performances of standalone visible light communication terminals using imitate infrared encoding technique

By introducing the imitate infrared encoding technique and employing a white light emitting diode (WLED), a pair of standalone visible light communication (VLC) terminals, including a transmitter and a receiver, were experimentally demonstrated. The mathematic modelling and formulation were proposed on the WLED´s luminous characteristics and the VLC channel response. The terminals were developed using ARM7-based embedded system, and experiments were carried out to derive their performances. A suitable illuminance of 200 lx (measured before the WLED) is preferred for obtaining a uniform bit error ratio (BER) over the distance of 0-2 m, and the measured BER is <;10^-4 with a communication data rate of 0.1-10 Mbps. High stability was also confirmed through measuring the BER results over 5 h at the two communication distances of 0.2 and 0.3 m and at 1 Mbps data transmission rate. Owing to the advantages of small size, low cost, and 10 Mbps data rate, this kind of terminals can be adopted in indoor short-distance wireless communication.