OPTOELECTRONICS LETTERS Vol.7 No.

5, 1 September 2011

Numerical analysis on an OOK-NRZ visible light communi-

cation system based on a single white LED

JIA Yong-po䌒∌വ, YE Wei-lin৊⦂⨇, TIAN Chong-wen⬄ዛ᭛, QUAN Xiang-yinܼⳌॄ, WANG
Jia-qi⥟௝⧾, SONG Zhan-weiᅟऴӳ, and ZHENG Chuan-tao䚥Ӵ⍯**
State Key Laboratory on Integrated Optoelectronics, College of Electronic Science and Engineering, Jilin University,
Changchun 130012, China

(Received 3 May 2011)

ƻC Tianjin University of Technology and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011

An OOK-NRZ visible light communication (VLC) system is designed by using a single white LED and a 550 nm visible
photodetector. The emitting model of the single LED is established, and the general expression of the detector’s output
signals under OOK modulation is deduced. With the selected LED, detector and other related parameters, the designed
communication system is optimized and its performance is analyzed. The optimized communication distance between the
LED and the detector is 0.54 m at the communication bit rate of 1 Mbit/s. With the best communication distance, when the
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is larger than 6.5 dB, the bit error rate (BER) can drop to 10-4. The analytical model and theory
presented in this paper can be of certain practical meanings in the design of similar communication systems.
Document code: A Article ID: 1673-1905(2011)05-0376-4
DOI 10.1007/s11801-011-1050-7

Compared with incandescent, fluorescent and other traditional signed and numerically analyzed.
sources, white LEDs have the advantages of higher lumi- As shown in Fig.1, the designed OOK-NRZ VLC system
nous efficiency, lower power consumption, longer life, consists of the transmitting part and the receiving part. The
smaller size, etc., which are known as the first choice for the working principle can be described as follows: at the trans-
future lighting equipment. Great progress has been achieved mitting part, the signals are coded and modulated with OOK-
in the manufacturing process, luminous efficiency, thermal NRZ, and then propagate through the white LED and VLC
design and other aspects related to LEDs[1-2]. In 2000, M. optical channel. At the receiving part, the signals received
Nakagawa, et al[3] firstly proposed the idea of wireless infor- by the detector are demodulated and decoded, and finally
mation transmission by using LED as the base station, which dealt if needed.
generates the concept of visible light communication (VLC)
[3]
. Compared with the traditional radio frequency (RF) comm-
unication, VLC shows favorable application prospects espe-
cially in the indoor and outdoor short-distance data trans-
mission[4-6], owing to higher power, faster transmission rate
(up to hundreds of Mbit/s), harmless to human, no electro-
magnetic interference, etc. In recent years, many institutes
have carried out researches on VLC under different
modulations, and achieved considerable progress[7-10]. In view
of the above trends, by using on-off keying (OOK)[11], or- Fig.1 Schematic diagram of the designed OOK-NRZ VLC
thogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)[12] and system using a single LED
other modulations, our group also perform the jobs on the
design and development of VLC systems. In this paper, an The definitions of two important characteristic param-
OOK-NRZ VLC system based on a single white LED is de- eters are as follows: the first one is the communication

* This work has been supported by the Innovation Fund For Technology Based Firms of Changchun, China (No.10ZC04).
** E-mail: zhengchuantao578@163.com
JIA et al. Optoelectron. Lett. Vol.7 No.5 gg

distance,which is the distance between the visible LED and where TdS and MdS are determined by the relative position of
the detector, and the second one is the bit error rate (BER), dS and LED. Therefore, the detector’s output current can be
which is the ratio of the received correct data to the original written as
transmission data. Because the spatial distribution of the LED
emitting intensity is definite, as the detector’s position iP(O) = R(O) P(O) , (5)
changes, the output signals will also change. Meanwhile, be-
where P(O) is the detector’s responsiveness at O. So the
cause of the detector’s noise, background light noise and other
detector’s total output photocurrent over the whole spectrum
interferences, the detector’s output signals can also be
is written as follows,
affected. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a mathemati-
cal model to analyze these factors, and thus improve the com- Omax 1
i ³O ³ I 0 (O ) R(O ) cos m (M d S ) cos(T d S ) d S d O . (6)
munication performance through optimizing the parameters. min A
r2
Fig.2 shows the emitting model of the single white LED,
However, in order to drive the LED practically and to
which contains a continuous range of radiated wavelengths.
operate it at a linear state, we need to use a Bias-Tee circuit
Therefore, for a certain radiated wavelength O, its intensity
to superimpose the OOK modulation signals on a DC bias
can be considered to obey the Lambert distribution[13]. Along
voltage[14]. In this case, at a certain wavelength, the LED lu-
a luminous angle M, the radiated intensity (unit: cd) is
minous intensity will present the similar changes to the OOK
modulation signals, which can be written as
I  O ,M  I 0  O  cos m M  , (1)

where I0(O) is the radiated light intensity at O, and m is the I0 O ,t  I omax  O  ª¬ ps  t  cos  Z c t   1º¼ , 0  p  1, (7)
 ln 2 where Iomax(O) is the maximum intensity of output light at O
luminous order determined by m . The half-

ln cos M1 2 
value angle M1/2, which means that the radiated intensity is
half of that along the LED emitting axis, shows the directiv-
ity of the LED light-emitting.
(namely, the center emitting intensity, determined by LED’s
quiescent bias current), p is the modulation coefficient, s(t)
is the binary baseband signal, and cos(Zct) is the carrier signal.
After filtering out the DC component and being amplified,
the pure signal transmitted to the coherent demodulator is

Omax 1
uc(t ) ( KRL p)s(t ) cos(Zct )³O ³
min
r2
A

I omax (O ) R(O ) cos m (Md S ) cos(T d S ) d S d O , (8)

where K is a magnification factor, and RL is the load resister

Fig.2 Emitting model of the single white LED of the detector. Because of the strong emitting directivity of
the LED, we ignore the multi-path effect of illumination, and
Take the sensitive surface of the detector as the radiated only consider the influence of Gaussian noise. Ultimately,
area. A micro element dS is selected for analysis, and its open- the signal entering the coherent demodulator is
ing angle to LED can be expressed as
u (t) = uĄ
(t) + n (t) , (9)
d: d S cos T , (2)
r2 where n(t) is the Gaussian noise. Besides, define the power
where T is the angle between the normal direction of dS and ratio between uĄ (t) and n(t) as sigral to-rtoise ratio (SNR),
the direction of incident light injected to dS, and r is the dis- which is expressed as
tance from LED to dS. Within d:, the total radiated power
(unit: lm) is P[u c(t )] .
SNR 10 lg (10)
1 P[n (t )]
d)e  O  I  O , M  d: I 0  O  cos m M  cos T  dS . (3)
r2
Based on the designed OOK-NRZ system, Fig.3 shows
Let the sensitive area of the detector to be A. Correspond- the mathematical model of the single LED and the visible
ing to a certain wavelength O, the total received radiated power photodetector. The response wavelength of the detector is
by the detector is 550 nm, and the sensitive area is circular and perpendicular
1 to the LED emitting axis. As shown in Fig.3(a), the vertical
P( O ) ³ I 0 (O ) cos m (M ) cos(T d S ) cos(T d S ) d S , (4)
A
r2 distance between LED and detector is r0 , and the diameter of
gg Optoelectron. Lett. Vol.7 No.5

the detector’s sensitive area is d. To ease the calculation, the
sensitive area is meshed for realizing the integration in Eq.(8)
through summarization, where 'x and 'y are the calculation
steps along x and y axis, respectively, as labeled in Fig.3(b).
The related parameters of the LED and detector are shown
in Tab.1.
firstly. Here, we select r0 = 0.5 m, and the corresponding out-
put voltage amplitude is 1.24 V. Therefore, the threshold volt-
age is set to be 1.24 h 0.4 = 0.496 V.
When r0 = 0.5 m, the influence of the LED emitting in-
tensity Iomax on the communication BER is shown in Fig.5. It
can be seen that when the SNR increases from 1 dB to 5 dB,
the BER significantly gets lower. Under a certain SNR, as
Iomax increases, the BER decreases. But when Iomax increases
to a certain value, the BER begins to increase again. This
suggests that under a certain SNR, there exists the optimal
emitting intensity, under which the BER is the smallest, due
to the match between the magnitude of the received signal
and the preset threshold voltage.

Fig.3(a) Mathematical model of the visible LED and dete-

ctor; (b) Meshing of the detector’s sensitve area

Tab.1 Related parameters of the visible LED and detector

Parameter Value
Optical wavelength of the detector 550 nm (90% through)
LED central emitting intensity Iomax(O=550 nm) 0.73 cd
LED half-value angle M1/2 70°
Sensing area diameter of the detector d 5 mm
Detector responsiveness R(O=550 nm) 0.34 A/W
Amplifying gain KRL 50 k:
Carrier frequency fc 10 MHz Fig.5 Effect of the LED emitting intensity Iomax on the com-
Base band signal frequency fs 1 MHz munication BER (r0 = 0.5 m)
Modulation parameter p 1.0
Calculation step 'x, 'y 0.01 mm Under different SNR values, Fig.6 exhibits the influence
of the communication distance r0 on BER, where Iomax= 0.73
Using the parameters listed in Tab.1, we calculate the cd We can see that as the SNR increases, the BER gets smaller.
relation between the amplitude of the amplified signal uĄ (t) Under a certain SNR, with the increase of r0, the BER, as
and the communication distance r0, as shown in Fig.4, where shown in the three curves, firstly decreases and then increases,
the saturation effect of the amplifier is considered, and the and there is the minimum value at a certain r0. This shows
maximum amplified voltage set as 12 V. It can be seen that that under a certain SNR, there exists the optimal communi-
as r0 increases, |uĄ
(t)| decreases rapidly. In order to use the cation distance, defined as r*0 , at which the error rate is the
coherent demodulator to demodulate the signals, we need to minimum. From Fig.6, for the designed OOK-NRZ VLC
determine the threshold voltage of the coherent demodulator system, we obtain r*0 = 0.54 m.

Fig.4 Relation between the amplitude of the amplified si- Fig.6 Effect of the distance on the communication BER
gnal |uĄ
(t)| and the distance between LED and detector r0
Ą (Iomax = 0.73 cd)
JIA et al.
As shown in Fig.7, under the optimal communication dis-
tance r*0 =0.54 m, we calculate the influence of the SNR on
the BER, where Iomax= 0.73 cd. It can be observed that as the
SNR increases, the BER decreases. When SNR > 6.5 dB,
BER < 104. This confirms that the designed system can be
used for practical data transmission with the above selected
components and optimized parameters.
Fig.7 Effect of SNR on the communication BER (Iomax=
0.73 cd and r*0 = 0.54 m)
As a conclusion, under the OOK-NRZ modulation, with
a single white LED and a visible photodetector, we design a
VLC system. We establish the mathematical model for the
single LED and the system, and deduce related formulae,
including the radiated power, output voltage of the detector,
etc. The influences of the communication distance, LED emit-
ting intensity and SNR on the communication BER are
analyzed. The calculated results show that under the selected
parameters, the optimal communication distance is 0.54 m.
When the SNR is larger than 6.5 dB, the communication BER
is less than 10-4. The proposed model and analysis theory are
Optoelectron. Lett. Vol.7 No.5 gg
of certain reference value in the design of similar VLC
systems.
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