Side-emitting fiber-based distributed receiver for visible light communication uplink

Abstract

We present a distributed receiver for visible light communication based on a side-emitting optical fiber. We show that 500 kbps data rate can be captured with a bit-error rate below the forward-error correction limit of 3.8·10−3 with a light-emitting diode (LED) transmitter 25 cm away from the fiber, whereas by increasing the photodetector gain and reducing the data rate down to 50 kbps, we improve the LED-fiber distance significantly up to 4 m. Our results lead to a low-cost distributed visible-light receiver with a 360° field of view for indoor low-data rate, Internet of Things, and sensory networks.