Gigabit rate mobile connectivity through visible light communication

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a short range wireless transmission of visible light through free space. The light source can be based on Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs), that are becoming common use in our future connected home where they can be simultaneously used for both illumination (i.e. LED TVs, Light bulbs, etc.) and communication with appropriate photodiodes in the receiver side. VLC can be adapted to mobile devices enabling new types of short range applications such as HD video streaming. However, many of the new emerging mobile applications require increasingly high data rates; some can even exceed 1 Gbps. In this paper, we propose new optical/electrical front-end and baseband systems that achieve the required bit rate of 1 Gbps over free space. We also detail the implementation challenges of the low power VLC communication system for a mobile device. Specifically we focus on the new VLC baseband system and propose new baseband scheme with state-of-the-art LDPC channel coder. Finally, we will present the results of the new proposed gigabit baseband system as well as lab test results of a single channel VLC front-end running at 540 Mbps and 1080 Mbps.