Visible Light Communication with Multicarrier Modulation Utilizing a Buck-Converter Circuit as Efficient LED Driver

This paper deals with the problem of how to drive an LED in visible light communication (VLC) systems in an efficient way employing high-order modulation schemes. A circuit known from power electronics, the so-called buck converter, is evaluated. Buck converters are frequently used power supplies in LED illumination systems, and provide high efficiencies at low complexity. To demonstrate the ability of this type of converter for the purpose of data modulation, discrete multitone transmission (DMT) is used in numerical results. The circuit has been simulated in LTSpice. The bit error rate (BER) is determined for different system parameters.