Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Low-Cost Visible Light Communication Testbed

The proposed testbed demonstrated and studied the behavior of channels and modulation techniques. Modulation techniques such as On-Off Keying (OOK) and Pulse Duration Modulation (PDM) were implemented on the testbed. Their performance was evaluated based on the distance between the transmitter and receiver, bit rate, and accuracy. A free-space optical communication channel model was also implemented in MATLAB to study the impact of physical characteristics on channel performance. Physical factors such as room dimensions, LED power, and transmitter field of view (FoV) were considered for the simulation. Additionally, the results of the proposed testbed were compared with the standard indoor free-space optical communication channel model implemented in MATLAB. It was observed that the PDM modulation technique consistently provided a 2x improvement in accuracy over OOK modulation for the same distance.