A Photon-Counting Micro-LED Array Based Indoor Optical Wireless Communication System: Design and Experiment

In this paper, a 450 nm blue GaN micro-LED array based photon-counting optical wireless communication (OWC) system over 50 metres indoor corridor environment is designed and experimentally demonstrated. As a high luminous efficiency device, the $80\ \mu\mathbf{m}\times 80\ \mu\mathbf{m}$ micro-LED array is adopted. Moreover, we develop a poisson shot-noise limited DC-biased optical-single-carrier frequency-domain-equalization (DCO-SC-FDE) method to overcome the multipath impact. Quantitatively, under 50 metres indoor corridor channel, the low energy OWC link down to −78.6 dBm received optical power with data rate of 1.0 Mbps and bit error rate (BER) of $8.8\times 10^{-4}$ can be achieved. The good BER performance is underneath $3.8\times 10^{-3}$ FEC limit, presenting its feasibility for long-range indoor corridor links. Furthermore, the proposed scheme provides significant performance improvements over a recent reported photon-counting system [1].