Book Description

The societal reliance upon wireless systems continues to rise due to mobile data interchange. A closer look at the current allocation of 38 GHz 5G Cellular is desperately pointing to, and suggesting the crowding of the frequency spectrum. Therefore this study explores visible light communication as one of the emerging technologies to help meet up with these challenges. The Visible Light Communication (VLC) refers to the communication technology which utilizes the visible light source as a signal transmitter, the air as a transmission medium, and the appropriate photodiode as a signal receiving component. This study appraises the extant literature on Solid State Lighting (SSL), with emphasis on Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). The study highlights the weaknesses of the existing system, the advantages and the significance of the new system using prototype methodology. The study focused on the design and implementation of Visible Light Communication (VLC) circuit for wireless data transmission by designing an analog circuit to integrate with a computer or mobile phone, and then sending some form of data using visible light LEDs from a transmitter, and decoding it with a receiver. The design adopted Beagle-Bone-Black (BBB) as development platform and the circuit was tested with Proteus 8 Professional and data sent reliably and accurately over a short distance at a fair speed which ensures that the initial goals for the functionality of this new system which includes being able to send audio, text or pictures over a distance of approximately 10 meter at a data rate of at least 10 Mbps was achieved. The study shows that visible light communication has the potential to provide high speed data communication with improved energy efficiency and communication security/privacy due to its unique characteristics and advantages. Also, Visible Light Communication can complement the RF-based mobile communication systems in designing high-capacity mobile data networks and can be incorporated in the next generation 5G network. The study therefore recommends error control mechanism and Dimming Support to be integrated in the subsequent studies.