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Ethernet over light

University of British Columbia

The advent of high-brightness, fast-switching Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) has facilitated Visible Light Communication (VLC) as a new form of Optical Wireless Communication (OWC) over the visible light spectrum. In VLC, these LEDs serve a dual purpose of communication on top of general illumination. The biggest challenge facing VLC lies in finding the “killer application" that will propel the technology to widespread adoption. One of the ways we believe this can be achieved is by integrating VLC with pre-existing Ethernet Local Area Network (LAN) backbones. Although there has been some preliminary research in this area, specifically involving 10Base-T over VLC, none have explicitly dealt with Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) over VLC. In this thesis, we investigate the implementation of analog transmission of 100Base-TX over VLC in an amplify-and-forward approach, which we coin as Ethernet-over-Light (EoL). We present the design of a VLC transmitter and accompanying receiver developed for EoL, and include a comprehensive channel model to analyze this Ethernet-VLC link. Equalization techniques were explored to overcome the various shortcomings associated with the EoL channel, and to improve the performance of the overall system. This VLC-LAN solution proved to be a viable alternative for providing a wireless broadcast link wherever LEDs would be deployed for illumination in an indoor setting.

Text

2015-01-06

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/51772

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/