Hybrid diffuse IR transmitter supporting VLC systems with imaging receivers

Indoor visible light communication (VLC), using white-LED lighting, generally assumes lights are ON during communications. In this paper, we propose a new Hybrid diffuse Infrared transmitter (HDIrT) coupled with an imaging receiver to support VLC system when the light is dimmed or is totally turned off. Infrared (IR) optical communications boasts similar advantages as VLC systems. It can also provide high transmission rates. The ultimate goal of our proposed system is to increase the signal to noise ratio (SNR), mitigate the channel delay spread and the effect of inter-symbol-interference (ISI) when the system operates at a high data transmission rate. The delay spread is reduced from 1.55 ns to about 0.1 ns when a narrow field-of-view (FOV) imaging receiver replaces a wide FOV non-imaging receiver. At a higher data rate of 2.5 Gb/s, the simulation results show that the imaging HDIrT system achieves about 17 dB SNR in the presence of multipath dispersion, receiver noise and mobility.