Performance analysis for joint illumination and visible light communication using buck driver

The visible light communication (VLC) can provide data transmission via the illumination light emitting diodes (LED). This paper introduces a new model to analyze the bit error rate (BER) of binary phase modulation in VLC for an arbitrary modulation depth and data duty cycle while taking into account both the Gaussian and signal-dependent shot noise. The impact of the driver design on the BER and its impact on ripple have not been considered in detail before. We compare two different LED driver schemes, namely directly adapting the driver control loop and binary shunting. We address data rate, BER, and power efficiency, for which we propose to use the extra energy per symbol above unmodulated light. We further introduce an analysis of the effect that (truncated) ripple interference has in the (matched or other) filter of the receiver. Ripple causes a harmful interference in VLC, and thus a BER expression is derived to include its effect. Two approximations are proposed to model the ripple interference, and their accuracies are compared by simulations. A low-pass filtering is proposed to alleviate the impact of ripple interference in VLC system.