Asymmetrical bidirectional VLC based on beam homogenizer OAM generation technology

An asymmetric bidirectional visible light communication (B-VLC) system is presented in this Letter. It combines beam homogenizers with a spatial light modulator (SLM) to implement the orbital angular momentum (OAM) generation technology at a terminal user for uplink data transmission. The major advantage of the proposed approach is that multiple OAM modes can be arbitrarily generated simultaneously by a single SLM. The uplink transmission capacity can also be significantly improved by multiplexing more generated OAM channels. For the proof of concept, an asymmetric B-VLC based on the OAM generation technology for uplink transmission at a distance of nearly 2 m has been implemented. The baseband modulation schemes, including on-off keying (OOK) and quadrature phase-shift keying, were also implemented to validate the transmission performance. The experimental results show that the downlink transmission capacity of up to 2.2 Gbit/s can be achieved using an S -polarization beam. In comparison, the uplink transmission capacity can also be significantly enhanced by using P -polarization through multiplexing four OAM channels, each with a maximum transmission rate of up to 800 Mbit/s. The bit error rates (BERs) of both uplink and downlink transmissions were all under the forward error correction limit ( B E R = 3 × 10 − 3 ).