Integrated power line and visible light communication system compatible with multi-service transmission

As the shortage of spectrum is becoming a serious problem to the wireless communication, visible light communication (VLC) is attracting widespread attention. However, the access to the backbone network is likely to completely modify the communication network, thus leading to a great cost. Fortunately, the technology of power line communication (PLC) is a perfect match to VLC, which provides power supply and connection for VLC to the backbone network. In this study, the authors take an integration of PLC and VLC into consideration and mainly focus on a communication framework with multi-service. In the case of not making a big modification to the origin network, a direct re-transmission concept is considered and three implementation schemes which differ in frequency domain, time domain, and bit division multiplexing (BDM) are proposed. The demonstration platform and the simulation results suggest that the proposed schemes have the ability to support multi-service transmission with no big modification of current power line network. Moreover, the BDM scheme can accommodate different requirements of quality of service with better performance than conventional multi-service schemes.