Visible light communication using a solar-panel receiver

In this paper, a solar panel utilized as a photodetector with simultaneous energy harvesting is proposed in visible light communication (VLC). The solar cell is a self-styled passive device, which can convert optical signals into electrical signals. The generated energy can potentially be used to power user terminals or at least to prolong operation time. This work is an important step towards the future local area networks and vehicle to vehicle communication. In our proposed VLC system, a 3-W blue LED is as the light source and a low-cost solar panel is acted as the detector. A communication with a data rate of 15.03 Mbit/s and a bit error rate of 1.6883X 100
³
is successfully achieved using 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology over a 2-m air channel.