Design of a Low-Cost Visible Light Communication (VLC) System for Music and Video Streaming

In this paper, we describe our design of an end-to-end Visible Light Communication (VLC) system prototype that is able to stream music and video. Our system is able to transmit and receive video and audio signals and is capable of communicating at a data rate of 7.14 Mbps at a distance of 6.7 cm at a much lower cost for the transmitter and the receiver circuitry compared with existing VLC designs. The channel attenuation and SNR tests that we have conducted on our design demonstrate the VLC channel characteristics. In order to assess the design for deployment in more realistic settings, we also compute the transmit power that will be required if our prototype system were scaled to transmit over the dimensions of a room and show that the required transmit power is reasonable. Furthermore, our audio and video fidelity tests quantify the user experience via the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) metric. Finally, alternative transmitter and receiver designs are discussed as possible improvements for future work. This prototype constitutes a first step towards wide-scale deployment of VLC technology for downlink video transmission in indoor spaces in the smart cities of the near future.