Multilevel modulation scheme using the overlapping of two light sources for visible light communication with mobile phone camera

Visible light communication (VLC) with light emitting diodes (LEDs) is an emerging technology for 5G wireless communications. Recently, using complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor as VLC receiver is developed owing to its flexibility and low-cost. However, two illumination levels such as on-off keying (OOK) signal are used. To improve the system throughput and reduce complexity of the hardware design, in this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a multilevel modulation scheme for VLC system utilizing the overlapping of two light sources for the first time, and the two light sources are modulated by an OOK and a Manchester signal respectively. At the receiver, a CMOS camera can demodulate the Manchester and the OOK signal simultaneously. Meanwhile, a low-pass filter (LPF) is used to enhance the system performance. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed multilevel modulation scheme can achieve a net data rate of 4.32 kbit/s.