Effect of buck driver ripple on BER performance in visible light communication using LED

Abstract

This paper analyses the communication performance for visible light communication (VLC) with Manchester encoded amplitude modulation. In particular, it considers the ripple generated by the LED driver as an important noise contribution for VLC. The ripple depends on the oscillation frequency of the converter which typically is chosen to satisfy other performance criteria such as power conversion efficiency. This paper models the ripple as an additional noise if a buck converter LED driver is adapted for VLC. We argue that ripple can as a worst case be modeled as a random binary offset in the bit detection that randomly affects the distance between the data signal and the decision threshold. We derive expressions for the BER, propose approximations and we compare these with a simulation.