Comparison of Three Receiver Designs for Optical Wireless Communications using White LEDs

Three visible light optical wireless communication systems using asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM) and white light emitting diodes (LEDs) are compared. The LEDs considered have a larger modulation bandwidth for the blue optical frequencies than for the rest of the transmitted optical spectrum. It is shown that for typical parameter values, a novel diversity combining receiver has slightly greater capacity than a system optimized for reception of blue light only, and that both have greater capacity than a system designed to receive the entire visible light spectrum.