The effect of clock jitter in visible light communication applications

Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging communication technology for short-range applications, especially indoors. This technology uses light, emitted from super-illuminating semiconductors for the primary purpose of illumination, to carry information in addition. One of the major challenges faced in implementing VLC technology is to find a way to achieve communication without affecting the illumination. In this paper, we describe an inverse pulse position modulation method that encapsulates communication data in the time domain without affecting the illumination property, which is conveyed in the amplitude domain. Due to the fact that this modulation method requires accurate synchronization, we have studied the effect of clock time shift and jitter on the system bit-error-rate performance and have derived models that could be used to define the minimum requirements of the synchronization system.