12th International Conference on DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION SYSTEMS, Suceava, Romania, May 15-17, 2014
Matlab based Platform for the Evaluation of
Modulation Techniques used in VLC
Steven De Lausnay, Lieven De Strycker, Jean-Pierre
Goemaere and Nobby Stevens
Faculty of Engineering Science, DraMCo Research Group
KU Leuven
B-9000 Gent, Belgium
steven.delausnay@kuleuven.be
Abstract— In this paper, we describe an experimental
evaluation platform, which enables us to obtain the performance
of baseband modulation techniques for usage in Visible Light
Communication (VLC) applications. For the demonstration of
the evaluation platform, we have chosen for Manchester
encoding. This choice is exemplary, the described system is able
to deal with a large set of analog and digital modulation
techniques like Non-Return to Zero (NRZ), Return to Zero (RZ),
Pulse Position Modulation (PPM), Binary Frequency Shift
Keying, Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF), Phase Shift
Keying (PSK), … For the Manchester encoding, it is
experimentally demonstrated that the statistical distribution of
the received signal after matched filter operation, is Gaussian in
nature. This allows us to make an estimation of the Bit Error
Rate (BER) using Q-functions for Gaussian distributions. Our
results demonstrate that the estimated BER strongly depends on
the sampling rate at the receiver end. The sampling rate will
therefor determine whether or not the receiver can receive Non-
Line Of Side (NLOS) signals at normal light intensities.
Keywords— Baseband Modulation; Bit Error Rate; Evaluation
Platform; Gaussian Noise distribution; Visible Light
Communication
I. INTRODUCTION
Since a couple of years, the Light Emitting Diode (LED)
has become a major player in the market of indoor and outdoor
lighting applications. LEDs as a lighting technology offer a
number of important advantages with regard to other lighting
technologies, such as increased efficiency, high brightness,
color selection without significantly compromising the
efficiency, etc. [1]. Another distinctive characteristic of LEDs
with regard to more classical lighting technologies is the larger
bandwidth. This has opened the door for Visible Light
Communication systems (VLC), in which the original function
of lighting is combined with the creation of a wireless, optical
communication system. An important boundary condition is of
course that the lighting functionality is not jeopardized by the
data communication system. Due to the large bandwidth of
LEDs, this condition can be met.
Because of the interesting properties of VLC, we see this
technology as a new solution for localization in large indoor
environments. The infrastructure for VLC is already in
978-1-4799-5094-2/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE
Bart Nauwelaers
Faculty of Engineering Science, TELEMIC, ESAT
KU Leuven
B- 3000 Leuven, Belgium
buildings because of the lighting functionality and the light has
a high directivity compared to Radio Frequency (RF)
technologies. These two advantages make VLC an interesting
candidate for location-based services. With these services, the
information on your smartphone would depend on your
position within the building. This can be in the form of e.g.,
indoor guiding or location based information (you get extra
information about the piece of art you are standing in front of
at that moment).
In order to consider VLC as an accurate localization
system, the following conditions must be met:
• Positioning should be more accurate compared to the
existing RF wireless indoor localization systems.
• The potential degradation of lighting function as a
consequence of the overlay communication system
should be held to a minimum, which corresponds to a
unnoticeable difference for the observer.
• In order to get a rapid implementation, the
infrastructural impact should be very low.
For a localization system, every LED broadcasts its own
unique identification (ID) and the user, equipped with a
smartphone and photodiode, receives these IDs. Based on these
IDs and a previously downloaded map of the indoor
environment (containing the IDs of the LEDS and their
position), the location can be calculated.
For the transmission of the IDs, we want to explore a VLC
system using Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). As a
first step, we have to evaluate the single source to single
receiver behavior of different modulation techniques. With the
proposed evaluation system, a wide range off modulation
techniques can easily be evaluated. The goal of this paper is to
describe this set-up and to demonstrate its functionality
towards the BER evaluation for Manchester encoding. Specific
emphasis is put on the discrete sampling property of the
acquisition chart.
The paper is organized as follows. In section II, the general
description of the platform is given, with an emphasis on the
specific hardware components that were used. In section III,
we focus on one modulation technique, namely Manchester
57

Fig. 1 Practical set-up room
encoding. The sampling rate is left as a parameter in a non line
of sight configuration. Based on our observation, it is clear that
the BER strongly depends on the sampling rate at the receiver
end. At the end, a summarized overview of the main topics
covered in this paper can be found in the conclusions
section IV.
II. DESCRIPTION OF THE PLATFORM
Fig. 1 gives an overview of the point-to-point VLC system
under consideration. The system consists of three building
blocks, namely the transmitter (LED) which is mounted at the
ceiling, the receiver (photodiode) placed on a desk and the
room (channel) with a window, to introduce additional noise.
An overview of the different blocks of the evaluation
platform is given in Fig. 2. For quick evaluation and no
synchronization problems, the transmitter and receiver are both
implemented in Matlab. The connection to the hardware is
made with the National Instruments USB-6211 Data
Acquisition box (DAQ).
Fig. 2 The practical evaluation system
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A. Transmitter
At the transmitter side, random bits are generated at a bit
rate Rb. The bits are modulated with a baseband modulation
technique, like Non-Return to Zero (NRZ), Return to Zero
(RZ), Manchester Coding, Pulse Position Modulation (PPM),
Binary Frequency Shift Keying (BFSK), etc. These are all
baseband modulation techniques with low complexity, so they
can be easily implemented. The modulated sequence is up-
sampled by N where N is the ratio of the bit period (Tb) to the
sample period (TS). The up-sampled sequence is fed to the
pulse shaping, which produces a discreet time pulse train at the
sample rate TS (Equation 1). The discrete time pulse train is
directly fed to the LED driver through an analog or digital
output port of the DAQ which results in an analog signal s(t)
(Equation 2) [2]. The a(k) coefficients depends on the chosen
modulation technique. Further details can be found in [2].
s ( nTS ) = ∑ a ( k ) p ( nTS − kTb ) (1)
k
s (t ) = ∑ a ( k ) p (t − kTb ) (2)
k
In order to accelerate the implementation of the technology,
we use LEDs, which are currently used for lighting
applications. High power LEDs currently used for lighting
applications are composed of a blue LED with a phosphor
layer. Previous research has show that the phosphor layer will
limit the optical bandwidth of the LED and thus the maximum
data rate for communication [3]–[5]. For the experimental set-
up described in this paper, the Bridgelux BXRA-30E0740-A-
00 is used. This is a neutral white LED with a Lambertian C-
plane and a total Luminous flux of 820 lm. For the tests, the
LED is mounted onto the ceiling at a height of 3.5 m (Fig. 1).
As driving circuit for the LED, there are two possibilities
namely a LED driver that is currently used in lighting
applications or a Trance Conductance Amplifier (TCA). When
a LED driver is used, the digital Pulse Width Modulation
(PWM) input can be used to inject the data into the LED
current. To perform the measurements in this paper, a circuit
was build with the LT3756 from Linear Technologies. This
driver can control LEDs up to 30 W electrical power. It was

Fig. 3: Practical set-up room NLOS
possible to get bit rates up to 2 Mbps before the functionality of
the driver was corrupted. The driver is limited for the number
of modulation types possible namely only digital modulation
types with full On-Off Keying (OOK).
When analog modulation techniques or digital modulation
techniques with more flexibility in modulation depth want to
be evaluated, a TCA can be used. In [6] they proposed a block
diagram of a TCA transmitter for VLC. This block diagram
leaves a lot of possibilities for the implementation design,
where we build several transmitters. The final design has an
electrical bandwidth of about 20 MHz and can handle digital
and analog signals [7]. The TCA can drive the LED with a
current swing from 0 mA up to 1000 mA which is enough to
drive LEDs currently used in lighting applications which have
typical currents from 350 mA or 700 mA.
B. Receiver
The receiver part starts at the photo diode (Fig. 2) where the
incoming light is transformed to a current. The generated
current will depend on the responsivity curve of the
photodiode. Because the LED has a high blue component in the
spectrum [7], the responsivity curve of the photo diode should
be high in the wavelength region of 400 nm. This specification
was crucial for the selection of the appropriate detector. After
some research, a detector from Thorlabs was found to be the
most suited to fulfill this requirement. The PDA10A is a fixed
amplified detector with a Si-photo diode which is sensitive in
the visible light region and has a active area of 0.8 mm2. The
current from the photodiode is converted to a voltage with a
Trans-Impedance Amplifier (TIA). The PDA10A has a build in
TIA with a gain of 10 kV/A [8]. The output voltage of the TIA
is amplified a last time with a voltage amplifier, resulting in the
analog signal r(t). The signal r(t) is the transmitted signal s(t)
plus noise from the surrounding light. The received signal r(t)
is sampled using the DAQ at the same rate of the transmitted
signal with synchronized clocks. This way, there are no
synchronization issues. Remark that the delay due to the
channel is in the order of several nanoseconds for indoor
environments. This can be neglected for data rates up to several
Mbps [9]. The sampled version of the received signal (r(nTs))
is filtered by a matched filter with a impulse response which is
the time reversed version of the pulse shape filter. The output
of the matched filter is given by Equation 3 [2].
x ( nTS ) = ∑ r ( mTS ) p (( m − n ) TS ) (3)
m
The matched filter output is down-sampled to one
sample/bit at
n = kT / T
b S which produces a sequence x(kTb).
The decision block will estimated the received bits and
compare them with the send bits to calculate the BER.
For the performed test in Section III, the receiver is placed
on a desk at a distance of 2.7 m from the LED. Furthermore,
we have rotated the receiver over 90 degrees, in order to have a
non line of sight (NLOS) configuration. As can be seen on
Fig. 3, there is at least one reflection required for the
transmitted data to reach the photodiode.
C. Room
The room is a normal working office with gray plaster
walls and a large window over the entire length of one side of
the office. The room will have an impact on the channel
impulse response and will allow noise to intrude the signal for
an optical communication link. Because the data is traveling at
light speed, the delay spread will be in the order of
nanoseconds. For localization purposes, a high bit rate is not
necessary, so the influence of Inter Symbol Interference (ISI)
can be neglected [9].
Two important noise sources in a wireless optical link are
shot noise and terminal noise. Terminal noise is introduced by
the pre-amplifier electronics and is thereby signal independent
Gaussian noise [9]–[11]. Terminal noise will be the dominant
noise source when there is less ambient light (sun light, other
light sources, etc.). When a well-developed pre-amplifier is
used, the limiting noise factor is shot noise. This noise source is
introduced by ambient light as well as the received signal
power and can be modeled as Additive White Gaussian Noise
(AWGN) [9]–[11]. As shown in Fig. 1 the room has a window
that will allow sunlight to fall in onto the receiver, which will
introduce shot noise.
III. RESULTS
A. Modulation techniques
The modulation technique we have chosen is the
Manchester encoding. Remark that our set-up is not limited to
Manchester encoding; other binary line codes can be easily
implemented in the Matlab environment as well analog
modulation techniques. Manchester encoding is a split-phase
code, which is well suited for our purpose. In case of non-
return to zero codes, a long sequence of zero’s could introduce
flickering of the light intensity, which violates the
compatibility with the normal lighting function. Remark that
the bandwidth of the human eye is around 60 Hz. The zero
59
 Fig. 7 Distribution x(kTb) for N = 50
Fig. 6 Distribution x(kTb) for N = 200
crossing bandwidth of Manchester encoding is twice the
inverse of the bit time Tb, which has a positive impact on
flickering, even at lower data rates.
Other advantages of Manchester coding compared to other
baseband modulation techniques, are the easy clock recovery
(bit synchronization) and the received signal can be AC-
coupled at the receiver. In a VLC system the transmitted signal
can not be negative (s(t) > 0) and so also the received signal at
the photo diode.
In the specific experiment we performed, 106 bits were sent
at a data rate of 1 kbps by use of Manchester encoding. The
zero crossing bandwidth is 2 KHz and the duration of the
experiment was 1000 seconds, or almost 17 minutes.
B. Influence of the sample rate
One parameter that is left undetermined right now is the
ratio N, defined as the sample rate (1/TS) to the bit rate (1/Tb).
According to the zero crossing bandwidth and the Nyquist
sampling theorem, a value for N of 4 should be sufficient. The
critical component in the practical evaluation system of Fig. 2
is the discrete calculation of the matched filter output. The
matched filtering operation, which is basically the calculation
of an integral in the continuous time domain, is approximated
by a finite sum. It is clear that this sum is a better
60
Fig. 5 The average value µ as function of N
Fig. 4 The standard deviation σ as function of N
approximation as the number of sample points increases. In
order to evaluate the impact of the sampling rate, we have
chosen a high sample rate, namely 200 kSps, which results in
200 (= N) samples every bit time Tb. Once we have this high
sample ratio, we can easily reduce N by only selecting a
reduced set of these samples.
On Fig. 4 and Fig. 5, one can observe the distribution of the
measured x(kTb) samples for N = 50 and N = 200 when the
set-up is used of Fig. 3. An observation one can make is that
the scaled histograms can be well approximated by a Gaussian
distribution. We have plotted the magnitude of the average
value µ and the standard deviation σ as a function of N. The
result can be found on Fig. 6 and Fig. 7. There is no distinction
between these trends for a 0 or 1-bit sent. To determine
whether the histograms of the received data have a Gaussian
distribution, a KolmogorovSmirnov test (KS-test) was
performed. This test confirmed that the received data has a
Gaussian distribution, so proves that the noise introduced in a
VLC is AWGN.
Based on the histogram plots, it is clear that lower values of
N will lead to an increased BER. This trend is clearly

Fig. 8 The estimated BER as function of N
demonstrated on Fig. 8. The test was also repeated with the set-
up from Fig. 1. These results showed the same trend for the
BER as the one shown on Fig. 8 but a couple of orders lower.
This shows that the sample rate (1/TS) will strongly determine
if the receiver will be able to also receive NLOS signals in a
VLC system. This can be an imported factor when the system
is used as an indoor localization system.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper we have presented a platform that allows us to
evaluate analog and digital modulation techniques. With this
platform, modulation techniques like NRZ, RZ, PPM,
Manchester Coding, BFSK, DTMF, PSK, etc. can easily be
synthesized and analyzed using Matlab. The system allows us
to quickly compare the different modulation techniques and to
evaluate which encoding technique is most suitable to be used
in an indoor localization system based on LED lighting. In this
paper, Manchester Coding is chosen because it doesn’t
introduce flickering at low bit rates, an easy bit synchronization
is possible and the received signal can be amplified with an
AC- coupled amplifier.
The results of the practical set-up have shown that the BER
of a VLC system will depend on the sample rate of the received
signal. When the ratio of the sample rate to bit rate increases,
this decreases exponentially the BER of the system. For e.g., a
NLOS signal, the ratio sample rate over bit rate will determine
whether the BER becomes acceptable or not.
For an indoor localization system, this will be an imported
factor, which will determine if the positioning algorithm could
take into account reflections. When there are a lot of LOS
signals, it will be better to decrease the sample rate, so
reflections don’t influence the positioning algorithm. When
there are no LOS signals, the sample rate could be increased to
still receive an ID from LEDs so a rough estimation of the
position could be made. By changing the sample rate, a hybrid
system could me made where a rough position estimation could
be made when there are no LOS signal and an accurate position
could be calculated when different LOS signals are received.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the Agency for Innovation
by Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT).
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