Visible Light Communication System Evaluations with Integrated Hardware and Optical Parameters

Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging nascent research area having enormous application prospects. Efficient evaluation methods are critical requirements for implementing high-performance VLC systems. Most researches just focus on system analyses from optical channels, modulation methods, or communication theories. However, the basic theoretical analyses of the relationships between hardware circuit current energy and optical power are absent. This paper makes up for this deficiency. Based on a general VLC communication scenario, we theoretically analyze the transferring procedures between circuit current energy and optical power. The current energy transferring calculation model (CETCM) and current energy transferring (CET) parameters are proposed for the first time. The peak current energy response, current energy gain, threshold of optical power transferring distance, and current signal-to-noise ratio can be calculated by the CETCM and CET parameters. Experiments show that they can comprehensively reflect the communication characteristics of practical VLC system, and are quite important and valuable for VLC system evaluations, implementations, and optimizations.