Dimming is an important feature of an indoor lighting system where the illumination level can be controlled by the user. Therefore, integrating a visible light communication (VLC) system with an illumination system poses some challenges. One of the main issues is that the light unit should be “ON” all the time to ensure continuous communication. To ensure acceptance and adoption of VLC systems, an important issue should be addressed: how to communicate when the lights are “OFF” or partially dimmed. In this chapter, we propose five new infrared optical wireless (IROW) systems to support VLC systems when the light is totally turned off or significantly dimmed. To take advantage of both VLC and IROW, we introduce and implement the concept of a collaborative VLC/IROW system. In addition, we investigate the impact of partial dimming on the VLC system’s performance, and we propose an adaptive rate technique (ART) to mitigate the impact of light dimming. Moreover, in the case of no dimming, the VLC and IROW systems can collaborate to increase the data rate so it is higher than that in the pure VLC system. We have achieved 10 Gbps in an indoor environment, which is a 2× increase in the data rate compared with a pure VLC system.
Part of the book: Visible Light Communications
Adaptive beam steering in optical wireless communication (OWC) system has been shown to offer performance enhancements over traditional OWC systems. However, an increase in the computational cost is incurred. In this chapter, we introduce a fast hologram selection technique to speed up the adaptation process. We propose a fast delay, angle and power adaptive holograms (FDAPA-Holograms) approach based on a divide and conquer methodology and evaluate it with angle diversity receivers in a mobile optical wireless (OW) system. The fast and efficient fully adaptive FDAPA-Holograms system can improve the receiver signal to noise ratio (SNR) and reduce the required time to estimate the position of the receiver. The adaptation techniques (angle, power and delay) offer a degree of freedom in the system design. The proposed system FDAPA-Holograms is able to achieve high data rate of 5 Gb/s with full mobility. Simulation results show that the proposed 5 Gb/s FDAPA-Holograms achieves around 13 dB SNR under mobility and under eye safety regulations. Furthermore, a fast divide and conquer search algorithm is introduced to find the optimum hologram as well as to reduce the computation time. The proposed system (FDAPA-Holograms) reduces the computation time required to find the best hologram location from 64 ms using conventional adaptive system to around 14 ms.
Part of the book: Optical Fiber and Wireless Communications