Design and Implementation of Visible Light Communication Using Error Correcting Turbo Codes
Design and Implementation of Visible Light Communication Using Error Correcting Turbo Codes
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Abstract— Visible light communication is a short range optical wireless communication technology that is used for the illumination and
data communication simultaneously. It is one of the most promising technologies for the indoor wireless communication as it opens the
broad spectrum for applications. The spectrum (430 – 790 THz) used by the VLC system does not overlap with other wireless technologies
such as radio spectrum, and thus interference with other wireless signal is minimal. In this paper, hardware prototype is designed and
implemented for VLC system. The transceiver is designed for VLC offers a data communication at a distance of 5 m. The novelty of the
design lies in the application of turbo codes to improve the reliability of data communication. Simulation results are presented to represent
the bit error rate (BER) analysis. Hardware implementation results are also presented which verify the transmitted data being received
accurately at a distance of 5 m for indoor communication using visible light.
Index Terms— Source and Channel Coding, Modulation, Turbo-encoder, Turbo-decoder, VLC Hardware, Channel Modeling, Bit Error Rate
(BER).
—————————— ——————————
1 INTRODUCTION
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I N the present era the VLC has significantly important role
in wireless indoor communication systems. Now the poten-
tial of dual function of light emitting diodes (LED) has become
need for high data rate communication, error control coding
became an integral part of a modern digital communication
systems [10],[11].
a popular research topic due to the advantages of large band- There is always trade-off between energy efficiency and
width in terahertz, license free operation, and an inexpensive bandwidth efficiency. The code can usually correct more errors
front end. LED lighting has low power consumption, minimal if more redundant bits are added in the code word. If more er-
heat generation, high tolerance to humidity, and long life ex- rors can be corrected, the communication system can, operate
pectancy [1]. It is believed that the LEDs will replace the con- with a low transmit power and transmit at a higher data rate.
ventional illumination lights such as fluorescent lamps, incan- These are the properties which makes the code energy effi-
descent bulbs since they have high switching characteristic of cient. On the other side low-code rate have large redundancy
LEDs, light intensity can be modulated with data signal [1],[2]. and hence consumes more bandwidth. Decoding complexity
The internet-of-things (IoT) is a prominent use case exam- grows exponentially according to the length of the code, and
ple expected to outperformance traditional wireless sensors low rate codes sets high computational requirements to the
network. With the congestion of the radio spectrum utilization conventional decoders [12],[13],[15].
by WPAN, WLAN and other cellular standards, VLC has The general idea for achieving error correction is to add
emerged as a potential broadband transmission technology some redundancy in digital signal, which receivers can use to
promoting a complete Light Fidelity (Li-Fi) [3]. An Internet of check consistency of the transmitted signal, and to recover the
Things (IoT) for indoor lighting system that consists of multi- original transmitted data. Error-detection and correction tech-
ple luminaires with an IP address such as sensors and control- niques can be either systematic or non-systematic. In a sys-
lers are considered to perform Device-to-Device communica- tematic scheme, the data will be transmitted along with the
tion. The sensors provide sensing information for controlling parity bits side by side while in non-systematic code, the origi-
artificial lighting system and additionally serve as a data nal message is transformed into an encoded message that has
source for other building systems and services [4],[5],[6]. at least as many bits as the original message [14].
VLC generally is a short range wireless communication sys- In this paper an inexpensive hardware prototype is designed
tem, if we increase distance between the transceiver ultimate for the VLC system using the turbo codes having the code rate
the performance compromises. These performance limits of 1/3. Design of turbo encoder and decoder algorithms is dis-
communication system are determined by the channel in which cussed in detail in section 741. Simulation result in terms of
it operates [7],[8],[9]. Error detection and correction signify two bit error rate (BER) of the VLC channel using AWNG and
digital communication techniques that are responsible for hardware description is also described in rest of the paper.
transmitting digital data over unpredictable communication
channels reliably. Numerous communication channels encoun- 2 VLC COMMUNICATION SYSTEM
ter channel noise which may lead to errors during transmis-
sion from the information source to a sink. An error detection The main purpose of any communication system is to provide
technique helps the system in detecting such errors, while er- error free data transmission. In a communication system, in-
ror correction technique allows reconstruction of the original formation can be transmitted by analog or digital. In the pur-
transmitted data. With the advancement of technology and posed VLC system digital communication system is used. The
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basic digital communication system is shown in (Figure 1). modulation (PPM) [19]. In Visible light communication sys-
tems, simple and low-cost optical carrier modulation and de-
modulation are usually achieved by intensity modulation with
direct detection (IM/DD). The desired digital signal is modu-
lated onto the instantaneous power of the optical carrier, and
the detector generates a current proportional to the received
instantaneous power that is, only the intensity of the optical
wave is detected. This is because light of LED is non-coherent
therefore the information can be reliably encoded only in the
form of signal intensity. The amplitude and phase of the light
signal cannot be modulated or detected with LEDs and PDs
respectively. It limits the conventional modulation schemes
that can be adopted from the field of radio frequency (RF)
communications [1],[20]. OOK is the simplest form of ampli-
tude-shift keying, it is also easy to use in terms of hardware
implementation and integration. In this method binary ‘1’ is
represented with high voltage level and binary ‘0’ is repre-
sented as low voltage level. In our system on-off keying
(OOK) is used where, binary ‘1’ is represented by 5v and bina-
Fig. 1. Block diagram for communication system
ry ‘0’ with 0v. Similarly, In the case of demodulation 5v signal
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is mapped to binary ‘1’ and 0v signal is mapped to binary ‘0’.
2.1 Source Coding and Decoding
2.4 VLC Channel
Suppose a word ‘visible’ is to be transmitted. Before the
After the modulation of signal, signal is transmitted through
transmission of the word to channel, it is first converted into
transmitter in channel. The nature of channel is unpredictable.
stream of bits ‘0’ and ‘1’. This process of conversion is called
In case of visible light communication, generally there are
source coding [15]. There are many commonly used source
three types of channel, one is the Line of Sight (LOS), second is
coding techniques. If ASCII code is used each alphabet is rep-
Non-line of Sight (N-LOS), and third one is Diffuse Non-line
resented by 7-bit or 8-bit. The alphabets ‘v’, ‘i’, ‘s’, ‘i’, ‘b’, ‘l’, ‘e’
of Sight (D-LOS) [19]. In this paper LOS channel is used for
can be encoded to 8-bit as ‘01110110’, ‘01101001’, ‘01110011’,
VLC systems.
‘01101001’, ‘01100010’, ‘01101100’, ‘01100101’. Similarly during
channel decoding, the resulting stream of bits is divided into
group of 8-bits. Later on, each group of 8-bits will be convert- 3 ERROR CORRECTION TURBO CODES
ed into the alphabets. In theory, error free transmission is possible if the data rate
does not exceed the channel capacity. So, a theoretical upper
2.2 Channel Coding and Decoding limit on the data transmission rate is defined as avoiding any
Error control coding is a technique to detect and possibly cor- errors in the transmission. This limit is known as channel ca-
rect the errors by introducing redundancy in data bits. In gen- pacity or Shannon capacity [21]. Although Shannon had de-
veloped his theory in 1940s, several decades later the code
eral, the channel encoder will divide the input message bits
designs were not able to come close to the theoretical limit.
into blocks of ‘k’ message bits and replaces each ‘k’ message Even in the beginning of the 1990s, the difference between the
bits block with an n-bit code word by introducing n-k redun- theoretical bound and practical implementations was still at
dant bits to each message block [16],[17],[18]. During the best about 3dB. The original concept of turbo coding was in-
channel decoding every channel code has its own decoding troduced by Berrou, Glavieux, and Thitimajshima in a paper
[22] presented at IEEE forum, and it was further elaborated in
algorithms. Turbo algorithms for channel encoding and de-
[23]. Two papers by Benedetto and Montorsi, provided the
coding are discussed in section 3. first time theoretical analysis for the performance of turbo
codes [24],[25]. These codes combine the concepts of iterative
2.3 Modulation and Demodulation Scheme
decoding, soft-in soft-out decoding, Recursive Systematic
Modulation is a process of adding a message signal to an elec- Convolutional (RSC) encoding, and non-uniform random in-
trical or optical signal carrier. Among several techniques, there terleaving [26]. Turbo codes are high performance error cor-
are two modulation schemes which are widely used in digital rection codes and first practical codes. In fact, for essentially
communication, on-off keying (OOK) and pulse-position any code rate and information block lengths greater than
about bits, turbo codes with iterative decoding can achieve
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BERs as low as at SNRs within 1 dB of the Shannon limits, In this sequence, 1 represents the systematic output and the
it is the value of for which the code rate equals channel transfer function generates the parity bits as shown Table 1.
capacity.
The encoder of turbo codes consist of two or more concatenat-
ed recursive convolutional encoders, serial or parallel manner
along with an interleaver. The constituent codes can be either
(1)
block codes or convolutional codes [27]. Currently, most of the TABLE 1
work on turbo codes has essentially focused on convolutional PARITY BITS GENERATED BY TRANSFER FUNCTION
turbo codes (CTC) and block turbo codes (BTC) have been
partially neglected.
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Typically, an RSC encoder having a rate of r = 1/2 is termed as
component encoder. The two component encoders are sepa- Each convolutional encoder based on a recursive systematic
rated by an interleaver. The output of the turbo encoder con- convolutional code having the 4 states. The operation of the
encoder is summarized by the trellis diagram shown in Figure
sists of the systematic output data and the parity outputs from
4, which shows the bit pairs output for each possible transition
two constituent RSC encoders. Thus the overall code rate be- between successive states.
comes r = 1/3. Figure 2 shows the turbo code encoder.
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[31],[33] for each information bit followed by choosing the
data bit value corresponding to MAP probability for that data
bit. In this paper, there are two decoders used for outputs 4 VLC COMMUNICATION SYSTEM
from both encoders shown in Fig. 5. Both decoders provide Following are the discrete phases which we have experienced
estimation of the same set of data bits, but in different order incrementally to realize our product in the given time, which
due to the presence of interleaver. Information is iterated includes considering a VLC channel study, its simulation and
number of times to enhance the performance. During each utilization in hardware. We simulated a LOS VLC system and
iteration, the estimates are re-evaluated by the decoder using evaluated its BER performance and finally, we performed
the information from other decoder. It allows the decoder to hardware implementation.
calculate the likelihood [32], also helps that what information
bit was transmitted during each iteration. In the final stages, 4.1 LOS Optical Channel
the hard decisions will be made to assigning the values 1 or 0 To provide a theoretical analysis and simulation results of the
to each bit. proposed VLC system, a light positioning system (LPS) chan-
The APPs are used to calculate the likelihood ratio. The nel model is established. In visible light communication, the
logarithmic form of the likelihood is the log of likelihood ratio influence of the directed light is large and significantly de-
denoted by LLR. The mathematic expressions are represented pends on the performance of the system [34], so only the line
in (2) and (3). of sight (LOS) link is assumed in this paper. The LPS channel
model in a LOS environment is shown in Fig. 6. Due to the
similar characteristic between visible light and infrared, the
(2) channel model of wireless infrared communication [35],[19]
can be used for LPS. The channel direct current (DC) gain can
be given as,
(3)
(4) (1)
(6)
Here,
where, is the encoded data bit, is the state and
is the received sequence, observed at time interval k = 1 to where, m is the order of lambertian radiation, which is relative
N. The decoder makes the decision by comparing the to to the semi-angle at half illuminance of an LED denoted as
the zero threshold i.e. = 1 if > 0 else = 0 if < . Smaller the semi-angle higher the gain in normal direc-
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(7)
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ed by keeping the upper limit of and is equal to 90˚. (5) are given in Table 2.
At receiver side, hard decision is made before decoding the
turbo codes. The received signal is decoded by using BCJR
algorithm [33],[37]. In BCJR, several soft decisions are taken
which are dependent on the number of iterations, before tak-
ing a final hard decision [30].
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strates that the as the distance is increased the signal is further
distorted and attenuated but still the two levels can be differ-
Fig. 8. Simulation results in term of performance analysis of BER entiated.
5 HARDWARE DESIGN
Figure 9 shows the overall functional block diagram of the
proposed VLC system prototype. The transmitter side consists
of a signal source (computer), an external power source, mi-
croprocessor (encoder), LED driver circuit and array of LEDs.
In the same fashion, the receiver side consists of an array of
photodiodes, amplifier circuit, microprocessor (decoder) and a
computer to display the received signal. Both transmitter and
the receiver need power to operate. At the transmitter side, the
microprocessor is connected directly to the computer’s USB
port [39],[40]. An output of 5V from a computer is used to op-
erate a microprocessor. The microprocessor is then output
either a 5V or 0V on its pin. The output of the microprocessor
is then sent to the analog circuit to drive the LEDs. The micro-
processor at the receiver side is powered on in the same man-
ner as on the transmitter side. A 5v from the decoder is fed Fig. 9. Block diagram for VLC hardware system
into the amplifier in order to amplify the photodiode’s output.
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Fig. 10. Component analysis by using the digital oscilloscope Fig. 11. Prototype of designed VLC hardware system
5.3 Testing of VLC System Prototype with Turbo Codes 6 HARDWARE DESIGN
Finally, In order to demonstrate the effect of turbo codes out- In this paper we focused on the design, simulation and hard-
put of the designed prototype is shown in Fig. 12. A string ware implementation of a VLC system. The proposed com-
“COMSATS LAHORE PAKISTAN” is sent to analyses the munication system deals with indoor data communication by
output response of the VLC prototype using turbo codes. The utilizing the LEDs used for illumination and for data trans-
good result confirmed that the VLC system prototype with the mission. In this work, we focused on improving the reliability
help of turbo codes can receive data accurately at a distance of of data communication. Therefore, we proposed utilizing error
5 meters. correction codes, such as turbo codes to improve the quality of
data communication. To verify the facts, we simulated a VLC
communication system in MATLAB and tested its BER per-
formance with and without Turbo codes. There was a remark-
able improvement of BER in the VLC system using turbo
codes, also supported by references in literature. Finally we
were able to implement the proposed VLC system in hard-
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work. [18] Lee, P. and Wolf, J. (1989). A general error-correcting code construc-
tion for run-length limited binary channels. IEEE Transactions on In-
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