Implementation of dimming controlled visible light communication using Raspberry Pi

Visible light communication (VLC) is a technology of wireless optical communication, which combines lighting and communication simultaneously. In indoor VLC system, both data communication and lighting quality plays an important role and must be considered. Thus, to achieve the desired levels of illumination, dimming control in VLC is an efficient technology. In this paper, the authors have designed and implemented a dimming control VLC system employing multi header-hybrid pulse position modulation (MH-HPPM) to achieve dimming functionality. MH-HPPM supports various dimming levels and also doesn’t have flicker problems. In this paper, the authors present the implementation of MH-HPPM based VLC system using Raspberry Pi. The prototype is designed using low-cost commodity hardware. Comprehensive experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of MH-HPPM based VLC under dimming levels 0.25, 0.5 and 0.75. The results demonstrate that designed prototype supports a communication distance up to 3 m for dimming level 0.25 and 3.5 m for dimming level 0.5 and 0.75. It is also observed that MH-HPPM based VLC system also achieves and maintains better throughput for different incidence angle.