Performance enhancement scheme for mobile-phone based VLC using moving exponent average algorithm

With the popularity of mobile phone, the mobile-phone camera used as visible light communication (VLC) receiver is attractive. However, a mobile-phone-based VLC system suffers from a high extinction ratio (ER) fluctuation for high data rate, which effects the bit error rate (BER) performance, transmission distance, and data rate. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate using the moving exponent average (MEA) algorithm to decrease the ER fluctuation and enhance the performance of the mobile-phone-based VLC system. Through the proposed MEA algorithm, not only the ER fluctuation can be decreased, but blooming can be eliminated as well. In order to demonstrate that the MEA algorithm can enhance the performance of the mobile-phone-based VLC system, we evaluated the BER performance as changing transmission distance and data rate. From the experimental results, a 7% forward error correction (BER = 3.8 × 10^-3) requirement can be satisfied at 50 cm when the data rate is 4.8 kb/s and at 100 cm when the data rate is 3.6 kb/s.