Simultaneous Data Transmission Using Multilevel LED in Hybrid OCC/LiFi System: Concept and Demonstration

In this letter, a hybrid-encoding scheme is developed for an integrated optical camera communication (OCC)/light-fidelity (LiFi) system. A single multilevel light-emitting diode (LED) is used for transmitting both OCC and LiFi data. Two data streams are transmitted, where each stream is intended for LiFi and OCC. The first stream is transmitted at a very high frequency using the LED. The LED flickers in two different power levels creating consecutive sequences. A smartphone camera receives the sequences as binary successions, wherein the second data stream is modulated. The modulation is referred to as intensity-shift keying. A testbed prototype is implemented to demonstrate the proof-of-concept, which is also used to show the bit-error-rate performance of the proposed scheme.