Visible Light Communications-Recent Progresses and Future Outlooks

The trends of LED replacing fluorescent and incandescent lamps for lighting are obvious in commercial applications. Then the visible light communications based on white light LED are promising communication technologies for high speed data transmissions. A bottleneck for this technology is the limited modulation bandwidth of LED. This paper reviews the recent improvements on bandwidth extension and methods increasing transmission speed at first. Then, major application areas of the visible light communications are discussed. At last, a conclusion and prospects are given.