A Survey of Wireless Communication Using Visible Light

This paper introduces the concept of visible light communication (VLC). The urgent need of VLC is to overcome the problems faced in RF communication. Unlike existing methods of wireless communication, the visible light portion of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum is used in VLC to transmit information. This is similar to established forms of wireless communication such as Wi-Fi which uses radio frequency (RF) signals to transmit information. In VLC, communication takes place by modulating the intensity of the LED light in such a way that it is undetectable to the human eyes. A photo sensitive detector which demodulates the light signal into electronic form is used as a receiver. This work provides an extensive overview of applications and design challenges for VLC, challenge for indoor communication, uplink channel and at each layer of the communication protocol stack.