Integration of Downlink Scheme VLC Access Techniques for

Low-cost Implementation Indoor Communication System: A Survey

Hikmatyarsyah

and Sasono Rahardjo

Research & Development Dept., FiberHome Technologies Indonesia, Tanjung Duren Selatan 11470, Jakarta, Indonesia

Electronics Technology Center, Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology Indonesia (BPPT),

Puspiptek Serpong 15314, Tangerang, Indonesia

Keywords: Visible Light Communication, Power Line Communication, Power over Ethernet, Distributed Antenna

System, Input-dependent Noise, Input-independent Noise, Bit Error Rate, Single Carrier Modulation, Multi-

carrier Modulation.

Abstract: Integration of Visible Light Communication (VLC) system to Power Line Communication (PLC) or Ethernet

(PoE) in terms of channel gain are introduced. The paper proposes the efficient system after comparison in

terms of cost installation as a substitute for the use of optical fiber as a transmission media for this hybrid

system to adopt early in the in-building coverage as a potential candidate to replace the radio-based traditional

indoor system (DAS system) for low-to-medium transmission as commonly refer as small-cell. The downlink

scenario has been chosen to apply with each different advantages and disadvantages of these hybrid

technologies. In this paper, we provide a survey of each hybrid channel gain model with the introduction of

input-dependent and input-independent noise to the input signal with data rates as the output with the error

measurement of bit error rate (BER) using common optical single or multi-carrier modulation. After

comparison, we can conclude that hybrid VLC with PLC as the network backhauling has the advantage in

terms of already-existed facility and easy-installment for an external adapter and this hybrid system tends to

applied lower LED power consumption even though achieved lower data rates making this hybrid system has

full potential to be applied in the near future.

1 INTRODUCTION

Indoor wireless coverage has become an important

key in telecommunication operator solutions which

consume a lot of data traffic. According to Ericsson

Mobility Report 2021, total global mobile data traffic

in Q1 2021 exceeded 66 exabytes per month in which

dominated by smartphones that account 95% of total

mobile traffic and is projected to grow by a factor of

close to 5 to reach 237 exabytes per month in 2026

(Ericsson, 2021). Cell densification such as small-cell

to femto-cell arises when traffic capacity in-buildings

increases dramatically which is beyond the ability of

the macro-cell to carry the traffic, as a result, the

operator will lose a significant revenue (5gamericas,

2018). The use of high frequency transmission signals

up to millimeter wave and the installation of active

antennas such as multibeam to beamforming are

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8733-4895

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9569-2457

becoming a trend in small cell solutions. As for the

use of solutions such as the example above if adjusted

from outdoor to cover indoor site is still not optimal

due to the thickness of the building walls and

inefficient power generated and the data traffic it

carries. Digitalize indoor coverage (DIC) product

such as Huawei's lampsite were introduced around

2014 which uses optical fiber and Ethernet for

transmission media instead of RF cables which were

applied by the previous system, the distributed

antenna system (DAS). However, the use of indoor

based on small cells also results in increased radio

interference between the edges of the cell will result

in a decrease in speed or even not smooth in handover

which has an effect on the quality of service (QoS).

One of the solutions is to explore visible light

communication (VLC) that has the potential to

compensate for what RF-based systems lacking

Hikmatyarsyah, . and Rahardjo, S.

Integration of Downlink Scheme VLC Access Techniques for Low-cost Implementation Indoor Communication System: A Survey.

DOI: 10.5220/0010776200003121

In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Photonics, Optics and Laser Technology (PHOTOPTICS 2022), pages 97-105

ISBN: 978-989-758-554-8; ISSN: 2184-4364

including a spectrum deficit due to exponential

growth in demand for wireless transmission capacity.

The visible light communication market has a

CAGR of 101% over the forecast period (2019-2024)

with expected to reach value of USD 391.62 billion

by 2024 based on research and markets report

(Researchandmarkets, 2019). This market

development is based on the significant growth in the

application of indoor LEDs which are the main signal

source for VLC replacing inefficient fluorescent

lamps and incandescent bulbs. LED lights are highly

powered efficient, low carbon emission and long-life

span making this illumination type are 75% less

power consumption and lasting 25% longer compared

to previous type which is incandescent lamp (Nardelli

et al., 2017). With the high potential to offer more

efficacy, decreasing prices and even lower power

consumption, it is estimated that the global market

share of LED lighting usage would increase from

46% in 2019 to 75% in 2025 (Zissis et al., 2021).

In addition to using optical fiber, Ethernet is

chosen through the LAN architecture for indoor

communication backbone network due to its

adaptability to new technologies especially for IT

infrastructure (IEEE 802.11) with high reliability,

high throughput and low cost (Burton et al., 2014).

Apart from optical fibre for backhauling that concern

about penetration rate for housing installment and

tend to cost higher, currently, the major candidates for

the VLC backhaul are usually either PLC or Ethernet.

However, one of the drawbacks of using PLC as data

delivery access is considered a harsh environment

which are noisy, unsecure and prone to

electromagnetic interference (EMI). The twisted pair

cable used for Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) offers a better

noise immunity environment and improved security

over PLC. Ethernet has compatibility with existing

LAN networks and has range data rates from 10 Mbps

to 10 Gbps, and has established as media access

control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocol for

local area network (LAN) (Mark, 2014). However,

PLC has the advantage of having the readily installed

electrical power lines in every residence and

unreachable-optical-fibre area for broadband access

(IEEE, 2010). PLC has been successfully used to

transmit radio programs, home automation and

networking, internet access and automated meter

reading (Ferreira et al., 2011). Broadband PLC

solutions commonly operate in the frequency band

starting at about 2 MHz and ranging up to about 30

MHz or optionally beyond. In 2009 and 2010, PLC

specifications have been consolidated into two

standards developing organizations, namely IEEE

1901 and ITU-T G.9960/61 (Ma et al., 2013).

Spectral and energy efficiency are some of the

crucial parameters when designing a low-cost and

efficient hybrid network system. According to (Wu et

al., 2020), the spectral efficiency and energy

efficiency of the hybrid networks are greater and

considerably more energy efficient than standalone

networks, respectively. Hybrid VLC-Ethernet has

been reported in (Haigh et al., 2012), a narrow beam

point-to-point VLC-LAN link using a single white

phosphor LED and a blue filter at the receiver. In

(Burton et al., 2014), the system offers data

communications using the 10BASE-T Ethernet

protocol with the link availability as good as a short-

range CAT 5 cabling system that applies white

phosphor LED with the use of a simple RC

compensator at the receiver to avoids the need of

higher cost blue filter is reported. Initial research of

VLC systems combined with Ethernet (PoE)

backhauls is explored in (Elgala et al., 2011). The first

VLC and PLC integration prototype was proposed by

a Japanese research group in 2003 (Komine and

Nakagawa, 2003), using a single carrier binary phase

shift keying (SC-BPSK) modulation. In (Komine et

al., 2006), the first OFDM modulation deployment

has been applied to this hybrid system to combat the

multipath and to achieve higher spectral efficiency in

the year 2006. In (Gheth et al., 2018), the additional

relay gain turns out has a positive effect on the

performance of VLC-PLC. The rest of the

development focusing on these systems will be

reported and highlighted more in section 4. Since

then, many research findings are provided in hybrid

VLC-PLC systems. Besides these two hybrid

systems, a lot of VLC research combined with RF

systems which are not discussed in this paper. This

paper only focuses on the downlink scheme survey

without an uplink scenario.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows.

Section 2 reviews the system description for propose

hybrid systems in terms of downlink scheme with the

noise involved to the transmitter as well its channel

gain for both VLC-PLC and VLC-Ethernet. Section 3

describes the common optical modulation techniques

in VLC to apply in these hybrid systems from single-

carrier modulation to multi-carrier modulation. The

comparison of the experiment in both VLC-PLC and

VLC-Ethernet based on LED power consumption and

data rates are discussed in section 4. Finally, section

5 gives some concluding remarks regarding this

survey as well as the next challenge of the hybrid

VLC communication systems.

PHOTOPTICS 2022 - 10th International Conference on Photonics, Optics and Laser Technology

Figure 1: Point-to-point VLC system (Wang et al., 2017).

2 SYSTEM MODEL

The method of the visible light communication

system is to implement intensity modulation with

direct detection (IM/DD) for low complexity as

illustrated in Figure 1. The data are not sent in the

underlying phase or amplitude of the optical carrier

but rather by varying the instantaneous intensity of its

power. Consequently, only positive signals can be

detected at the receiver (Ma et al., 2013). In this

section we discussed the characteristics of VLC and

hybrid VLC channel model of the transmission

systems with the introduction of noise that is

independent or dependent on the input signal.

2.1 VLC Noise

The noise is generally assumed to be independent of

the signal. This assumption is reasonable if the

receiver suffers from intensive thermal noise.

However, in practical VLC systems, due to the

random nature of photon emission in the light-

emitting diode (LED), the strength of noise depends

on the signal itself. The main noise sources include

thermal noise, shot noise and amplifier noise. The

thermal noise and the amplifier noise are independent

of the signal since both of the noises emerged when

the surroundings of the system affected with sudden

changing temperature and with the effect of

amplifying received signal from VLC channel to

convert into electrical signal inside receiver system,

respectively, and each of the two noise sources can be

modeled by Gaussian distribution. Meanwhile, the

strength of the shot noise depends on the signal itself

due to rapid changing when strong ambient light is

occurred making this noise easy to corrupt the

conversion rate of the hole and pair particle inside a

photodiode. The further discussion about this mutual

information analysis the input-dependent as the result

of the bit error rate (BER) is well reported in (Wang

et al., 2017) (Lin et al., 2018).

2.2 Ethernet Noise

The Ethernet signal originating from a computer or

router could be either biphase or triple level.

100BASE-Tx (Fast Ethernet) is one of the Ethernet

standards adopt MLT-3 line code or triple level as the

information signal in which use Non-Return-Zero

(NRZ) modulated input signal over three voltage {-

1V,0V,+1V}, if we take this modulated signal

transmitted over CAT5 UTP cable ethernet type, the

distortions that are modeled include : {1} transmitter

jitter, {2} waveform overshoot, {3} baseline wander,

{4} cable attenuation, {5} flat loss, and {6} return

loss (Mark, 2014). Transmitter jitter refers to a phase

delay in input signal modulation that modeled as

uniform probability with zero mean and a define

peak-to-peak value. Waveform overshoot is

overshooting characteristic to the final voltage value

that this effect modeled as a second-order low pass

filter. Baseline wander defines a dropped signal from

an average baseline that has a tendency to affected

low-frequency components more as a result of the

unbalanced input signal that contains spectral energy

in which this effect modeled as a second-order high

pass filter. Cable attenuation referred to as

propagation loss as a result of a signal traveling in an

imperfect conductor modeled as a transmission line

with constant attenuation and phase depending on

resistance, inductance, conductance and capacitance.

Flat loss contributes to the insertion loss of the

transmit magnetics, receive magnetics and RJ-45

connectors, this effect modeled as three define

individual terms. Return loss refers to the amount of

power loss due to signal reflections inside the cable

from impedance mismatches that represented as the

ration of incident power to reflected electrical power.

2.3 PLC Noise

The noise in PLC systems consists of colored

background noise, narrowband disturbance, and

impulsive noise (Zimmermann and Dostert, 2000).

Narrow-band interference results from the frequency

Integration of Downlink Scheme VLC Access Techniques for Low-cost Implementation Indoor Communication System: A Survey

sharing between PLC technology and radio amateurs.

Background noise groups the rest of the noise

generated over PLC channel apart from narrow-band

interference and impulsive noise. Impulsive noise,

categorized as periodic and aperiodic, is mainly

generated by both human activities and electric

appliances connected to the lines (Nlom et al., 2018).

According to (Meng et al., 2005) (Nassar et al., 2011)

(Mathur et al., 2015), impulsive noise is the most

destructive noise source. One of the solutions is to

apply inherent clipping or nulling mechanism that

basically applied before optical modulation to combat

impulsive noise as reported in (Kubjana et al., 2018)

with the noise modeled as middleton class A and

additive white gaussian noise (AWGN).

2.4 VLC Channel Model

In Figure 1, the drive current of an optical source is

directly modulated by modulating signal m(t), which

in turn varies the intensity of the optical source x(t).

The receiver employs a photodetector, with a

response which is the integration of tens of thousands

of very short wavelengths of the incident optical

signal, that generates a photocurrent y(t). The receive

photocurrent is proportional to the square of received

electrical field. VLC channel has transfer function is

modeled by line-of-sight (LOS) as illustrate in Figure

2 below and non-LOS (NLOS) or sometime called

diffuse link. VLC channel model is referred as

Lambertian model and both LOS and NLOS channel

are well describe in (Ghassemlooy et al., 2013).

Figure 2: VLC channel for line-of-sight scheme in

5mx5mx3m room.

Typical VLC channel in LOS condition above is

simulated using MATLAB program with VLC

parameters : ∅



⁄

= 70

, Ω = 1x10

-4

m, d = 2 m, Ω



5x5x3 m, and φ and α are 70

and 60

, respectively.

2.5 VLC-PLC Channel Model

Based on frequency range and data rates, power line

communication is divided into narrowband and

broadband. Broadband PLC (BBPLC) has a range of

frequencies from 2 MHz to 300 MHz and data rate for

more than 500 Mbps, making this type of PLC

technology could support high-demand service. The

In-home power line network is made of a high

number of branches with short length. If it presents

high attenuation, strong fading effects and phase non-

linearity summarize this hostile communications

medium (Ndjiongue et al., 2017).

The channel model in PLC can be modeled by

top-down or bottom-up approaches also known as

time domain and frequency domain-based,

respectively (Tonello and Versolatto, 2011)

(Zimmermann and Dostert, 2002). The bottom-up

model transfer function of PLC channel is well

describe in (Zimmermann and Dostert, 2002). Model

of cascaded PLC-VLC represented in the Figure 3

that use AF relaying (Ndjiongue et al., 2017), this

amplified and forwarded mechanism occurred when

the signal is detected as input for VLC channel in

which the signal sent over PLC channel undergo an

attenuation factor. Therefore, PLC signal is amplified

in order to re-transmit over the VLC channel. If we

use the model according to (de Beer et al., 2013), all

activities involving PLC channel distortions do not

reach the VLC channel, thus the scenario presented in

the Figure 3 exhibits cancellation of the PLC noise at

the input of the VLC channel.

Figure 3: The model of hybrid VLC-PLC system introduce

AF relaying mechanism (Ndjiongue et al., 2017).

The PLC-VLC cascaded channel is the product of the

convolution of two impulse response of VLC LOS

and NLOS channel with the bottom-up model of

VLC-PLC channel, in which the frequency domain as

PHOTOPTICS 2022 - 10th International Conference on Photonics, Optics and Laser Technology

100

Figure 4: The model of hybrid VLC-Ethernet downlink system (Mark, 2014).

a result of the multiplication of their each transfer

functions. The frequency response of the above

modeled hybrid system based on the Welch method

is well describe in (Ndjiongue et al., 2017).

2.6 VLC-Ethernet Channel Model

Category 5 cable model of length 1-100 meter, typical

Ethernet channel using the parameters which are

describes in section 2.2 modeled as transfer function

according to (Mark, 2014). Given the link model in

Figure 4, that the component can be considered linear

and time-invariant, the channel is consist of a hybrid

wired with cable type CAT 5 and a wireless VLC link.

From Figure 4 downlink scheme of VLC-Ethernet

system, the received signal of VLC-Ethernet using

cable distortions CAT 5 transfer function of Ethernet

noise parameters is given (Mark, 2014).

3 OPTICAL MODULATION

In visible light communication, light is modulated

based on the changes of the light intensity;

consequently, the communication link would be

affected by non-linearity of the voltage-luminance

characteristic. However, voltage-luminance

characteristics experience memory-effect as a result

of temperature increases in LED. Common LEDs that

installed commercially are yellow phosphor with blue

LED chip, this type of VLC light source has limited

in terms of available bandwidth because of slow

response time of phosphor. The limited bandwidth of

VLC channel leads to inter-symbol interference (ISI)

at high data rates, to overcome this limitation, pre and

post equalization and better-receive system using

blue filter at the receiver are the option to enhance the

lack of data rates, modulation technique usage also

important to expand the throughput as it can produce

higher spectral efficiency which is the key elements

in VLC system. VLC Consortium (VLCC) has

introduced the first IEEE 802.15.7 standard in 2009

(Rehman et al., 2018). The standard proposes on-off

keying (OOK), color shift keying (CSK) and variable

pulse position modulation (VPPM) techniques for

indoor and outdoor communication with the highest

achievable data rates for indoor communication can

go up to 96 Mbps. This paper highlighted the optical

modulation that often used for VLC as well as hybrid

systems in terms of single-carrier modulation and

multi-carrier modulation.

3.1 Single-carrier Modulation

Single-carrier modulation (SCM) techniques, such as

on-off keying (OOK), pulse amplitude modulation

(PAM), pulse width modulation (PWM), and pulse

position modulation (PPM) are categorized to

implement for this VLC system (Islim and Haas,

2016). In general, single carrier modulation

techniques are suitable candidates when desirable

throughput is low to moderate data rates applications,

even though unappropriate for high data rates. This

modulation technique offers low-complexity which

leads to a low-cost system, as well as this low-

complexity, can support illumination control. An

OOK scheme is applied for uplink modulation for

full-duplex LED to LED VLC system as reported in

(Niaz et al., 2017), this simple modulation technique

is also chosen for VLC-Ethernet 10Base-T hybrid

system that uses OOK-NRZ (Burton et al., 2014). The

PPM is more power-efficient than OOK, however, it

requires more bandwidth than OOK to support

equivalent data rates. Differential PPM (DPPM)

emerged to cope with this limitation. In (Quintana et

al., 2011), DPPM is adopted for the modulation

downlink VLC channel for a hybrid VLC-Ethernet

system. The effect of unequal bit duration for input

signal could affect the illumination performance, this

to prevent any possible flickering, Variable PPM

(VPPM) appeared as the standard 802.15.7 to support

dimming control. One way to improve bandwidth

efficiency in SCM is to apply equalization algorithms

in both pre or post equalizers. According to (Lian et

al., 2019), M-PAM is used to enhance the data rates

as the authors use various multiple access schemes for

a multi-user system.

Integration of Downlink Scheme VLC Access Techniques for Low-cost Implementation Indoor Communication System: A Survey

101

3.2 Multi-carrier Modulation

Multi-carrier modulation (MCM) schemes, such as

orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)

can be used to overcome multipath fading with

deploying cyclic prefix in every subcarrier that leads

to high-speed transmission in VLC system.

Moreover, this multi-carrier modulation can

maximize the system performance by supporting

adaptive power and bit loading which can adapt the

channel utilization to the frequency response of the

channel (Islim and Haas, 2016). OFDM is more

robust to frequency selective channels than a single-

carrier modulation scheme due to OFDM subcarrier

can be individually modulated and controlled

(Armstrong, 2009). However, one of the challenges

for an optical OFDM implementation is the high

peak-to-peak power ratio (PAPR) of the time-domain

signal that leads to signal distortions due to the non-

negativity constraint for the optical time-domain

signal and a reduced energy-efficiency (Ma et al.,

2017). Other optical modulations appeared to

minimize this issue by applying DC-biased OFDM

(DCO-OFDM) that adding a DC bias to the real

bipolar signals to clipping the remaining negative

samples of the lower part of bipolar signal. In

(Kubjana et al., 2018) the authors use this modulation

technique to combat impulsive noise, the DC bias also

limits the performance of the system in which larger

DC bias results in the increase of power required.

High DC bias would also incur some distortions as a

result of the upper clipping of the OFDM waveform.

Asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-

OFDM) used to avoid zero-clipping distortion. ACO-

OFDM modulates only odd frequency subcarriers and

set zero value for the even frequency subcarriers to

eliminate the negative part of the signal without the

need for any DC biasing. In (Niaz et al., 2017), the

authors have chosen ACO-OFDM scheme to

modulate the signal on the downlink channel that

used Red-Green-Blue (RGB) LEDs for the proposed

transmitter system. However, skipping half of the

subcarriers reduce the spectral efficiency to half of

that in DCO-OFDM, as a result, the signal-to-noise

(SNR) dropped by 3 dB. Another method for zero

clipping without using DC biased is Unipolar OFDM

(U-OFDM) and clipping enhanced optical OFDM

(CEO-OFDM). If U-OFDM uses the second frame of

subcarriers for the negative part of bipolar signal,

CEO-OFDM uses another extra frame to re-transmit

and recover both positive and negative after clipped

and both modulation techniques produce half of

spectral efficiency use in DCO-OFDM. Authors in

(Lian and Brandt-Pearce, 2018), reported that CEO-

OFDM can dramatically reduce the clipping

distortion but still require higher modulation

constellation to achieve higher data rates than other

OFDM techniques. PAPR reduction also achieved by

adopting pre-coding as reported (Sharifi, 2019), using

Vandermonde like matrix (VLM) scheme resulting

this system outperforms and reducing PAPR value on

another pre-coding that usually used in both DCO-

OFDM and ACO-OFDM. Spatial optical OFDM

(SO-OFDM) is also considered when an array of light

sources is used to transmit so that subcarrier of

OFDM could send allocated equally to different

LEDs resulting in low-PAPR value. In (Ma et al.,

2017) SO-OFDM is used to compare between single-

user and multi-user system, for multi-user in hybrid

VLC-PLC purposes, OFDM scheme shown to

outperforms OFDM-TDMA.

4 HYBRID SYSTEMS

COMPARISON

After discussing optical modulation techniques that

often implemented for VLC as well as hybrid VLC

system, and we have outlined both typical channel

gain in the transfer function, Table 1 and 2 below

summarize the achievement of hybrid VLC-PLC and

VLC-Ethernet in terms of modulation technique used

and certainly the throughput data rates in the end as

this parameter is crucial to be applicable in the near

future. This table below only represent the downlink

scheme achievement without considering uplink data

rates as this scenario still open in discussion which

suitable for these hybrid systems. The power

consumption is define according to LED usage rather

than in backhauling powerline or Ethernet. For

modulation techniques indicate that apply in the VLC

channel rather than inside both backbone networks.

Common Ethernet and PLC cable length on both the

above table is 100 m. Number 3 and 4 in Table 1, the

authors experiment with two methods to achieve

better BER performance even though lower data rates

are produced. The authors did not mention the

modulation technique is specific rather than

explaining equalizer and amplifier in the transmitter

and in an additional blue filter in the receiver system.

Number 5, authors also did not mention in terms of

power consumption for LED usage, and for BER

performance they added a blue filter in the receiver

system. For Table 2, numbers 1 and 2, the authors

used modulation error ratio (MER) instead of BER

and accounted for 23,5 dB and 24 dB on average,

PHOTOPTICS 2022 - 10th International Conference on Photonics, Optics and Laser Technology

102

Table 1: The VLC-Ethernet system for indoor Downlink scheme experiment.

No [Ref] Transmitter Receiver Modulation

Power

Consumption

BER <

Data

Rates

Transceiver

Distance

1. (Quintana et

al., 2011)

blue LED

coated with

yellow

phosphor

Photodiode

DPPM 5 W 1x10

-8

2 Mbps 1,5 – 2 m

2. (Burton et

al., 2014)

blue LED

coated with

yellow

phosphor

Photodiode

OOK-NRZ 7 W 1x10

-9

10 Mbps 2 m

3. (Zwierko et

al., 2016)

blue LED

coated with

yellow

phosphor

Photodiode

N/A N/A 1x10

-4

100

Mbps

3 m

4. (Zwierko et

al., 2016)

blue LED

coated with

yellow

phosphor

Photodiode

N/A N/A 1x10

-9

10 Mbps 30 m

5. (Shao et al.,

2015)

blue LED

coated with

yellow

phosphor

Photodiode

OFDM N/A N/A 74 Mbps 2 m

Table 2: The VLC-PLC system for indoor Downlink scheme experiment.

No [Ref] Transmitter Receiver Modulation

Power

Consumption

BER <

Data

Rates

Transceiver

Distance

Remark

1. (Ding et

al., 2015)

blue LED

coated with

yellow

phosphor

Avalanche

Photodiode

TDS-OFDM 1 W N/A 48 Mbps 5 m

Single-

user

2. (Song et

al., 2015)

two LEDs of

blue LED

with yellow

phosphor

Avalanche

Photodiode

OFDM 1 W N/A 48 Mbps 3 m

relaying

3. (Kashef

et al., 2016)

multi LEDs

serve as AP

Photodiode OFDM 100 mW N/A 10 Mbps 150 m

Single-

user

4. (Song et

al., 2016)

multi LEDs Photodiode OOK-NRZ N/A 1x10

-5

5 Mbps 3 m

relaying

5. (Sun et

al., 2017)

multi LEDs Photodiode OFDM N/A 1x10

-5

5 Mbps 3 m

relaying

respectively. Number 3, the authors explain the

system model without specifically mention BER

performance and the type of VLC receiver

photodiode. Number 6 of Table 1 and number 4 of

Table 2, both authors showed almost the same system

model only used different modulation techniques and

did not mention the power usage of both systems.

5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

After we review specifically in terms of channel gain,

modulation techniques, and achievable experiment

for hybrid VLC system in particular VLC with PLC

backhauling and VLC with Ethernet network, it

Integration of Downlink Scheme VLC Access Techniques for Low-cost Implementation Indoor Communication System: A Survey

103

shows that both systems are under research to reach

acceptable throughput in order to compete with RF-

based system. Overall, the VLC-Ethernet system

tends to have higher data rates compared to VLC-

PLC but the gap is still approachable. With VLC-PLC

demonstrates a lower power consumption on LED

driver. For VLC, the integration with PLC is much

easier that it can utilize the ubiquitous power line to

back up the VLC by adding PLC signal and forward

it to the bias current of LED and the installation can

be very easy by adding some modules to the LED

adapter without changes to the facilities. Both hybrid

systems mentioned in this paper could be prioritized

in terms of faster penetration rate and low-cost

installment to the area of non-optical cable and

making the optical fibre for backhauling VLC

network as the second option. For future work, the

energy-efficient uplink scheme for hybrid VLC-PLC

and VLC-Ethernet can be investigated, where the

option between Infrared, RF and WiFi are among the

potential to adopt as these technologies are well

researched and already-equipped in the user devices.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The first author wishes to thank for Indonesian

Agency for the Assessment and Application of

Technology (BPPT) to facilitate and cooperate to

finish this paper, the author also thank the author’s

future wife for her support and encouragement thus

author can complete this paper on time.

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