Towards Illuminating Optical Fiber based Visible Light Communication Uplink

We present a novel concept of visible light communication (VLC) uplink by introducing a distributed receiver (Rx) formed by an illuminating optical fiber (IOF) connected to the photodetector. The major functionality of IOF-distributed Rx is to sense/detect the light signal along the fiber span at a range of modulation frequencies coming from an on-off keying modulated light-emitting diode (LED) transmitter. We show that our proposed proof-of-concept of distributed Rx performs below the forward error correction limit of $3.8\cdot 10^{-3}$ at frequencies up to 400kHz. We unveil the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) limit of 19dB must be maintained for successful data reception. Higher data rates are predicted once the concept is optimized, especially in terms of SNR. The proposed IOF-based scheme can be considered as a solution to the current challenges of VLC uplink.