Embedded Visible Light Communication: Link Measurements and Interpretation

Abstract

Embedded visible light communication (VLC) systems built with low-cost commodity hardware are starting to attract the interest of the embedded systems community, but are yet unexplored in many aspects. The performance of VLC channels is not comprehensively studied under different communication settings and scenarios. In this paper we present an experimental characterization of the performance of low-end VLC channels and investigate the impact of various transmitter/receiver settings, protocol-level parameters and deployment aspects using both low-power and high-power LEDs. Our goal is to discover the strengths, weaknesses and limitations of embedded VLC systems.