Solar panel receiver system implementation for visible light communication

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a rapidly growing technology. This technology has several advantages: (1) communication is controlled and secured in the space, as light does not go through walls, (2) unlike radio waves, visible light does not interact with the electronic components which makes this communication technology suitable for electromagnetic wave-sensitive environments, and (3) visible light offers wider bandwidth and communication can have reach very high rates (i.e. gigabit). In this paper, we investigate power consumption issues for VLC systems in combination with power transreceiver technologies. We propose a Signal Conditioning Unit in solar panel-based VLC receiver to regular the input signal which was deformed from output of solar panel. A solar panel acts as photo-detector and also powers the receiver circuit by converting the light signal into electronic signal. The frequency response of our solar panel is 50 kHz after conditioning. The results show that for a data rate of 8kbit/s with a transmission distance of 50 cm.