Towards Embedded Visible Light Communication Robust To Dynamic Ambient Light

The presence of ambient light is a key challenge for reliable and robust low cost embedded visible light communication system. The photodetector used by these systems can perform poorly when subjected to bright ambient light or fluctuating ambient light. To solve this problem, we present an ambient light cancellation mechanism for low cost embedded LED to photodiode communication systems that utilizes a digital potentiometer to adaptively nullify the ambient light to provide an always ZERO output no matter what the ambient light intensity is. The proposed technique allows the receiver to correctly receive the light transmitted by the transmitter without any interference from the ambient light. We provide a detailed description of the modulation and demodulation schemes as well as ambient light cancellation mechanism, and their evaluations. The results show our proposed system can provide a reliable and robust visible light communication with extremely low symbol error rate (almost 0) and an acceptable data rate up to 3kbps given an operating distance of 50 centimeters.