An Optical Camera Communication Using Novel Hybrid Frequency Shift and Pulse Width Modulation Technique for Li-Fi

Abstract

With an increase in network-connected devices, the existing Radio Frequency (RF) spectrum is getting highly saturated. Non-RF-based communication systems have recently garnered attention as they can be considered an alternative to RF-based systems for some applications. The availability of efficient and low-cost electronic components like Light Emitting Diode (LED), photodiode, and cameras have been pivotal in building communications systems using visible light. High-speed communication using visible light can be achieved with customized hardware and software. Visible Light Communication (VLC) uses various properties of light to encode digital data, which is then modulated and transmitted over a short distance to the receiver. Photodiodes are inexpensive and provide low complexity implementation, but their adoption requires modifying existing devices to house dedicated sensors. On the other hand, in Optical Camera Communication (OCC), existing camera-based receivers are used to extract encoded data using properties of light like color, blink frequency, intensity, and polarity. In this paper, a novel OCC technique to achieve improved robustness using a Hybrid Frequency Shift Pulse Width Modulation (HFSPDM) is proposed, implemented, and evaluated. The performance of the proposed technique is compared for a short distance with On-Off Keying (OOK) and Binary Frequency Shift-OOK (BFSOOK) due to similar computational requirements. It was observed that the proposed technique used a 17% lesser number of frames than BFSOOK and provided 8% better BER than OOK under a test environment. It also supports longer distance communication than OOK as it is less sensitive to external noise.