FPGA-based Visible Light Communication System for Real-Time File Transmission

The digital image, character/texts, audio (music), and video are the multimedia contents commonly used as objects to be transmitted on the VLC system. This paper has performed the real-time file transfer successfully using VLC technology with a UART connection. The FPGA was chosen as a DSP due to its capability in clocked-speed. We used an Ethernet connection due to its easy configuration and ability to meet the high-speed communication requirement. It was used for communicating between the host and the client device computer. This work covers the MAC layer implementation, SoC FPGA for UART connection, and analog front-end (AFE) transceiver. According to the functional test, the achieved bandwidth of the Ethernet connection is about 83.6 Mbps. However, the FPGA’s clock is set at 100 kHz only due to the transferred file does not require a high speed. Thus, the physical layer baud rate is fixed to 11520 bps; it can be used for real-time transfer of a digital image with 512 pixels with no compressed file and error at 22 cm of optical LoS channel (no lenses).