Experimental Demonstration of Outdoor Free-space Hundred-meter Transmission Based on LED VLC System

Nan Chi, Yiguang Wang, Xingxinghuang and Jianyang Shi

Key Laboratory for Information Science of Electromagnetic Waves (MoE), Department of Communication Science and Engineering, Fudan University, 220 Handan Road, Shanghai 200433, China

nanchi@fudan.edu.cn

Visible Light Communication (VLC) has no doubt become a promising candidate for future wireless communications due to its widely indoor and outdoor usages, such as high speed wireless access vehicle networks and intelligent transportation system (ITS). In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a phosphorescent white LED based outdoor VLC system using receiver diversity technology to enhance the system performance. Maximal ratio combining (MRC) is employed in the two APD receivers to achieve the maximal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The experimental results show that after 100-m outdoor transmission the bit error rate (BER) of 400Mb/s 16QAM-OFDM signal is under the 7% FEC limit of 3.8x10^-3.   The results clearly demonstrate the benefit and feasibility of the MRC based receiver diversity technology for long range high speed outdoor VLC systems.