Wide field-of-view fluorescent antenna for visible light communications beyond the étendue limit
Abstract
Visible light communications (VLC) is an important emerging field aiming to use optical communications to supplement Wi-Fi. This will greatly increase the available bandwidth so that demands for ever-higher data rates can be met. In this vision, solid-state lighting will provide illumination while being modulated to transmit data. An important obstacle to realizing this vision are receivers, which need to be inexpensive, sensitive, fast, and have a large field of view (FoV). One approach to increasing the sensitivity of a VLC receiver is to increase the area of the receiver’s photodetector, but this makes them expensive and slow. An alternative approach is to use optical elements to concentrate light, but conservation of étendue in these elements limits their FoV. In this paper, we demonstrate novel antennas that overcome these limitations, giving fast receivers with large collection areas and large FoV. Our results exceed the limit of étendue, giving an enhancement of light collection by a factor of 12, with FoV semi-angle of 60°, and we show a threefold increase in data rate.
Citation
Manousiadis , P , Rajbhandari , S , Mulyawan , R , Vithanage , C D A , Chun , H , Faulkner , G , O'Brien , D C , Turnbull , G A , Collins , S & Samuel , I D W 2016 , ' Wide field-of-view fluorescent antenna for visible light communications beyond the étendue limit ' , Optica , vol. 3 , no. 7 , pp. 702-706 . https://doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.3.000702
Publication
Optica
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2334-2536Type
Journal article
Rights
Published by The Optical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
Description
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) (EP/I00243X, EP/K00042X/1, EP/K008757/1). IDWS also acknowledges support from the European Research Council (grand 321305) and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.Collections
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