High-speed indoor visible light communication system employing laser diodes and angle diversity receivers

The two main challenges facing high data rate visible light communication (VLC) are the low modulation bandwidth of the current transmitters (i.e. light emitting diodes, LEDs) and the inter symbol interference (ISI) caused by multipath propagation. In this paper, we evaluate laser diodes (LDs) as a source of illumination and communication instead of LEDs for a VLC system in conjunction with an angle diversity receiver (ADR). The main advantage of using LDs is their high modulation bandwidth that enables communication at data rates of multi gigabits per second for VLC when using a suitable receiver, such as an ADR, which mitigates the ISI. Our proposed system uses simple on-off keying (OOK) modulation, and it is able to provide data rates of 5 Gbps and a bit-error-rate (BER) of 10^-6 in the worst case scenario.