A Real-Time Baseband Processor for Li-Fi Internet Access

Abstract

In the past years, light fidelity (Li-Fi) has been gaining popularity in the research. However, many researches have done only offline transmission with laboratory instruments. As a result, it is not practical to be used in commercial product, due to its cost and size. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to address problems that arise from the real-time implementation of Li-Fi system using the commercial off-the-shelf components. The implementation was developed on a low-cost system-on-chip (SoC) field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The implementation supports orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation including time synchronization. In order to build a system that is more practical to be used in commercial product, the network stack that supports TCP and ICMP was also developed. As a result, the user client can easily access the Internet using the available web browsers. The results showed that the system is functionally verified enabling it for real-time transmission to be used to access the Internet. According to the result, our baseband processor can transfer data with a maximum throughput of 1 Mbps at 125 Mhz of FPGA.