Demonstration of Optical Wireless Communications Using the Pulsed Modulation PHY in IEEE 802.15.13

In optical wireless communications (OWC), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing has become a common choice of modulation as it is well established in both wired and radio frequency wireless applications. While it has advantages such as high spectral efficiency and robustness against multi-path propagation, power efficiency is suboptimal when using it together with intensity modulation and direct detection over optical channels. Unlike in the radio frequency domain, availability of spectrum is not a limiting factor, so range can be improved by using a wider bandwidth, lower spectral efficiency and, accordingly, simpler modulation techniques. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the performance of a complete physical layer based on on-off-keying and frequency-domain equalization as it is specified in IEEE 802.15.13 and prove its applicability to OWC.