An Efficient Repeater Assisted Visible Light Communication

Visible light communication (VLC) is a communication technology in which data is transmitted by varying the visible light intensity, i.e. intensity modulation (IM). In the absence of the line of sight (LOS) path between transmitter and receiver, the VLC signal degrades significantly. For an uplink transmission, this performance degradation becomes more severe, due to design constraints and limited power at uplink devices. In this paper, we propose a repeater assisted VLC system for improving the performance of the uplink VLC transmission. We conducted simulations by employing the on-off keying (OOK) modulation under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and compared with the conventional VLC system. The simulation results are analyzed in terms of bit error rate (BER), received power and illumination distribution to verify the performance enhancement of the proposed repeater assisted VLC system. It is found that the performance of the proposed system is significantly improved, even when the transmission path for uplink devices is completely or partially occluded.