A Physical Layer for Low Power Optical Wireless Communications
Malte Hinrichs, Pablo Wilke Berenguer, Jonas Hilt, Peter Hellwig, Dominic Schulz, A. Paraskevopoulos, Kai Lennert Bober, Ronald Freund, Volker Jungnickel
Abstract
Energy consumption is one of the critical issues in optical wireless communications transmitter design and a limiting factor to miniaturization and deployment in mobile devices. In order to reduce energy requirements, we assess a physical layer based on high-bandwidth on-off keying modulation. The use of on-off keying allows for highly efficient transmitter frontend designs that avoid operation of amplifier stages in a resistive mode, which has the potential of reducing their energy usage by an order of magnitude. Link-level simulations show that this physical layer can deal with typical frontend limitations and can operate in challenging non-line-of-sight channels. For these reasons, we believe that the solution evaluated here can deliver a significant contribution to optical wireless communications technology in a wide range of use cases.