Visible Light Communications

Abstract

Current wireless communications need to fulfill two important requirements according to different applications. The first is to achieve high-speed and long-distance data transmission, and the second is to realize ubiquitous and short-range information services. As a carrier for wireless communications, radio, infrared radiation, and visible light (VL) are complementary transmission media, and different applications call for the use of one medium or the others. Radio and infrared radiation are favored for the first requirements. For the second requirement, however, visible light communication (visible light communication (VLC)) is an advancing field, which has received much attention. VLC transmits data by intensity modulation of light sources, such as light emitting diodes (LEDs) and laser diodes (LDs), which are faster than the response of the human eye. VLC merges lighting and data communications in applications such as indoor lighting, signboards, wireless local area networks (wirelesslocal area network (W-LAN)), streetlights, vehicles, traffic signals, underwater signals, and so on. This chapter describes the methods and application of VLC and covers topics such as light sources, receivers, VLC technologies, and current applications including ubiquitous indoor information services, visible-light wireless LAN (visible-light wireless LAN (VLW-LAN)), and underwater visible-light wireless communication (underwater visible-light wireless communication (UVLWC)).