An Integrated Visible-Light and Radio Frequency Communications System

The architecture, design and implementation of an integrated radio-frequency (RF) and visible-light communication (VLC) system using a commercial RGB floodlight is presented. The system uses VLC-only on the downlink and RF-only on the uplink. The VLC link uses Orthogonal-Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) with positive and negative frequency components of OFDM symbols transmitted through the red and blue channels of the luminaire respectively. Integration of the RF and VLC subsystems occurs just above the physical (PHY) layer making this an attractive system for MAC and higher-layer protocol research. We experimentally demonstrate full-duplex operation of the system with simultaneous throughput of approximately 30Mbps and 39Mbps on the VLC downlink and RF uplink respectively. As such, we expect this work to be helpful to researchers designing hybrid RF-VLC systems as it has a number of desirable properties. These properties include low-level integration of the VLC and RF subsystems, not requiring VLC on the uplink, dual use of the luminaire for VLC and lighting, and relatively high throughput.