Design of an Ethernet-VLC adapter based on FPGA

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Ye, X. | Sun, G.^* | Zhao, W. | Wang, R.

Affiliations: College of Electronic Information and Optical Engineering, Nankai University, Tianjin, China

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: G. Sun, College of Electronic Information and Optical Engineering, Nankai University, Tianjin, China. E-mail: sungl@nankai.edu.cn.

Abstract: A design of Ethernet adapter for visible light communication (VLC) is proposed in this paper. Based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology and Ethernet protocols, the design applies Ethernet to VLC channel, enabling two-way transmission between both channels, giving solution to the conversion of signal between different coding formats. 8B10B DC-balanced encoding/decoding is used for VLC transceivers to ensure reliable and stable communication. At 1000BASE-T duplex mode, the maximum real-time net data rate on the VLC channel is 300Mbps by sending and receiving Ethernet frames in point-to-point communication with optical transceivers using phosphorescent white light emitting diode (WLED).

Keywords: Visible light communication, Ethernet, field-programmable gate array, white light emitting diode

DOI: 10.3233/JCM-190011

Journal: Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 779-787, 2019