Demonstration of Broadband Data Link Over Off-the-Shelf Solar Module With White LED

This paper experimentally demonstrates high-speed data transmission using an off-the-shelf poly-crystalline solar module while using a commercially available white light-emitting diode (LED) as an optical source. Solar panels are one of the major contributors to renewable energy sources, and their capability to provide high-speed data transmission makes them a viable contender for self-powered communication receivers. A bigger receiver area of the solar panel mitigates losses due to pointing errors, angle of arrival fluctuations, and misalignment in a communication link. This paper presents a bandwidth enhancement circuit (BEC) that enhances the 3-dB bandwidth of an off-the-shelf solar module-based receiver for facilitating visible light communication (VLC). The performance is compared with the other solar receiver designs, such as resistive load and passive equalization. We show that a data rate of 18.85 Mbps is achieved with the 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) over a VLC link of 330 cm. Optical lenses based on the total internal reflection (TIR) phenomenon are mounted over white LEDs to increase beam coherence, thereby increasing the transmission distance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest reported data rate using solar modules as an optical data receiver with a white light LED transmitter source.