An experimental study of power division multiplexing in visible light communication

Abstract In this paper, power division multiplexing (PDM) is used in visible light communication (VLC) to concurrently transfer different information from three users. Firstly, the performance of a one-channel PDM-VLC system with different signal power ratios, sample rates and transmission distances are investigated by simulations and experiments. The results show that for all three users in the one-channel PDM-VLC system, 150 Mbit/s transmission rate and 1.2 m distance can be realized under the limit of forward error correction (FEC). Furthermore, a two-channel PDM-VLC system with distance of 1 m is established and analyzed for the multi-user application. The BERs performance under different sample rates is also discussed, which indicates that the total transmission rate can reach 150 Mbit/s for three users and 250 Mbit/s for two users in the two-channel PDM-VLC system under the influence of the channel interference.