A 20-Mb/s VLC Link With a Polymer LED and a Multilayer Perceptron Equalizer

This letter experimentally demonstrates a visible light communication system using a 350-kHz polymer light-emitting diode operating at a total bit rate of 19 Mb/s with a bit error rate (BER) of 10
^-6
and 20 Mb/s at the forward error correction limit for the first time. This represents a remarkable net data rate gain of ~55 times. The modulation format adopted is ON-OFF keying in conjunction with an artificial neural network classifier implemented as an equalizer. The number of neurons used in the experiment is varied from the set N = {5, 10, 20, 30, 40} with 40 neurons offering the best performance at 19 Mb/s and the BER of 10
^-6
.