Development of a Visible Light Communications system for optical wireless local area networks

This paper presents the development of a Visible Light Communications (VLC) system for a local area network (LAN). The link is analyzed for all development stages and compared with a typical Ethernet system. The VLC system uses a Philips Luxeon Rebel as the transmitter and a Centronic OSD15-5T as the receiver coupled with a blue filter to achieve the required 10 Mb/s bit rates. The distance in which the optical link was measured was up to 1 m, and the link was successful (BER 10-6) for distances up to 0.7 m. To achieve higher distances and therefore to make the system practical in the home or office environment, the number of LEDs used can be scaled.