Adaptive threshold device for detection of reflections based visible light communication

One of the major restriction of existing visible light communication (VLC) systems is the limitation of channel transmission bandwidth which can be used in such systems. In this paper, an optimal and a suboptimal receiver are proposed to increase the on-off keying (OOK) transmission rate and hence to increase bandwidth efficiency of VLC system when a multiple reflections channel model is used to characterize the impacts of reflections in VLC signal propagation. Optimal detector consists of a simple receiver with a memory to find the optimal threshold based on the previous detected data. The error probability of the proposed detector is derived in the closed form and compared with the simulation results. It is demonstrated that the proposed detectors can improve the transmitting bandwidth close to the 3-dB bandwidth of the LOS channel model (which is several hundred MHz), whereas bit-error-rate (BER) remains low, in particular where the optimal detection is utilized.