A Physical Layer for Low Power Optical Wireless Communications

Energy consumption is one of the critical issues in optical wireless communications transmitter design and a limiting factor to miniaturization and deployment in mobile devices. In order to reduce energy requirements, we assess a physical layer based on high-bandwidth on-off keying modulation. The use of on-off keying allows for highly efficient transmitter frontend designs that avoid operation of amplifier stages in a resistive mode, which has the potential of reducing their energy usage by an order of magnitude. Link-level simulations show that this physical layer can deal with typical frontend limitations and can operate in challenging non-line-of-sight channels. For these reasons, we believe that the solution evaluated here can deliver a significant contribution to optical wireless communications technology in a wide range of use cases.