Experimental Proof-of-Concept Design of Self-Power LiFi Communication System for IoT Applications

This paper experimentally investigates the performance of a proof-of-concept self-power Li-Fi System based on solar cell for future Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The proposed system is capable to provide a low bandwidth connectivity and wireless energy harvesting simultaneously which consists of multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) LiFi transceiver. Different configurations of MIMOLiFi based on solar cell receiver are used in series and parallel and tested experimentally to evaluate its bandwidth and harvested power. Experimental results show that the series combination of solar cells in 4x 4 achieves the higher bandwidth, B= 71.97 KHz due to better accumulation of signal to noise ratio (SNR). The larger configurations, 4 x 4 when connected in series achieves the higher electrical power harvested of 80 mW than 65 mW in parallel combination. This harvested power could be stepped up and stored. Furthermore, for the communication performance, an on-off keying (OOK)- non return to zero (NRZ) modulation is implemented and tested. The results show that using a SISO system, a data rate of 50 Kb/s is achieved at BER= 5x 10
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, however, the data rate is doubled to 100 Kb/s at BER= 2.8x10
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using a 4x4 MIMO in series due to higher SNR and improved bandwidth. The results could be further justified with the received signal eye-diagrams and histograms.