Experimental assessment of the performance of cooperative links in visible light communications

Abstract

Cooperative communication is a technique that is employed in the context of visible light communications (VLC) to improve data rate, reach, coverage area and multi-user capacity of installed systems. In this work, we assess the performance of cooperative links with an experimental setup arranged in three configurations, where the position of source, relay and destination is varied, employing an OFDM modulation scheme. Results show that the cooperation improves the bit error ratio (BER) of VLC links, thus enabling faster data rates and more robust systems. BER analysis of the transmitted OFDM signal shows that an improvement of up to one order of magnitude is achieved when comparing the direct and combined cases.