IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 26, NO.
8, APRIL 15, 2014
Energy-Efficient Brightness Control and Data
Transmission for Visible Light Communication
Irfanud Din and Hoon Kim, Member, IEEE
Abstract— This letter considers the efficient utilization of
energy in a visible light communication (VLC) system. A joint
brightness control and data transmission are presented to reduce
the total power consumption while satisfying lighting and com-
munication requirements. An optimization problem is formulated
to determine the optimal parameters for the input waveform
of light emitting diode (LED) lamps; this problem reduces the
total energy consumption of the LED lamps while ensuring
the desired brightness and communication link quality. The
simulation results show that the proposed scheme increases the
energy efficiency of the VLC system.
Index Terms— Visible light communication, energy efficiency,
subcarrier pulse position modulation, wireless communication.
I. I NTRODUCTION
L IGHTING is a major source of electric energy consump-
tion in buildings; it is reported that almost a fifth of
the total generated electricity is used for lighting purposes
[1], [2]. Therefore, an increasing attention has been paid
to lighting energy saving for reducing energy consumption.
The widespread deployment of LEDs to replace traditional
lighting is a promising approach for reducing lighting energy
consumption. White LEDs consume roughly five times less
power than fluorescent bulbs and 20 times less power than
conventional light sources, which can considerably reduce
lighting energy consumption [3]. In addition, LEDs offer the
advantages of longer lifetimes, improved robustness, smaller
sizes, faster switching, and greater durability and reliability.
Taking advantage of their faster switching, LEDs can be
used for visible light communication (VLC). Owing to the
fact that VLC involves the combination of communication
with lighting, VLC using LEDs has attracted considerable
attention and has become a valuable means for wireless
communication. Further, VLC is an attractive replacement for
RF communication in indoor environments, because of its low
power consumption; high security; high data rates and a large,
unlicensed spectrum.
Dimming and communication support are the two main
objectives of white LED-based infrastructure. These two
objectives are related to each other, but are generally addressed
separately. Dimming and communication support are achieved
using different modulation techniques. Pulse width modulation
Manuscript received October 23, 2013; revised January 23, 2014; accepted
February 6, 2014. Date of publication February 13, 2014; date of current
version March 20, 2014. This work was supported by Incheon National
University Research Grant 2011. (Corresponding author: H. Kim.)
The authors are with the Department of Electronic Engineering, The Incheon
National University, Incheon 402-751, Korea (e-mail: hoon@incheon.ac.kr).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2014.2306195
1041-1135 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
781
(PWM) and pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) are widely
adopted for dimming support [4], whereas on-off keying
(OOK) and pulse position modulation (PPM) are employed
for data transmission. PPM and its variants (LPPM, inverted
(I-LPPM) and multi-pulse PPM (MPPM)) are effective tech-
niques for achieving power and bandwidth efficiencies respec-
tively [5]. Most of these modulation schemes were designed
for free space optical communication which is based on
infrared (IR) transmission, a method that supports commu-
nication only. Therefore, dimming support was not taken into
account.
Recently, studies consider the above mentioned two issues
simultaneously have been conducted. A variable-rate MPPM
for joint brightness control and data transmission was pre-
sented in [6]. This scheme achieves brightness control by
varying the number of information-carrying slots per symbol,
owing to which the data transmission rate changes with
a change in the brightness. [7] proposed two methods for
joint control of brightness and data transmission. In the first
method sub-carrier pulse position modulation (SC-PPM) is
used for data transmission, and brightness control is achieved
using PWM. Brightness and communication can be controlled
independently; however, changing the brightness affects the
communication signal power. The second method presented
in [7] uses SC-PPM for data transmission, and brightness
control is achieved by changing the modulation depth. This
scheme achieves constant data transmission rates even if the
brightness is varies in the range of 12.5%-87.5%.
The above mentioned approaches presents methods for
controlling brightness and data transmission simultaneously;
however, they do not take into account the optimization of
LED power consumption. The present work focuses on the
reduction of the total LED power consumption along with
communication and lighting requirements. An optimization
problem is formulated to reduce the power consumption
while satisfying both the lighting and the communication
requirements. The performance evaluation results show that
the proposed scheme achieves improvement in power savings.
The rest of this letter is organized as follow. In section II,
we presents the system model, mathematical modeling for
LED illumination and Optical communication, and problem
formulation. Simulation results are shown in section III and
conclusion are drawn in section IV.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
A. System Environment
A VLC system in an indoor environment, as shown in
Fig. 1, is considered in this letter. It is assumed that I identical
782
Fig. 1. System model for VLC indoor environment.
Fig. 2. SC-4PPM signal waveform.
LED lamps are equally spaced on the ceiling of a room,
and that the floor is geographically divided into J identical
square grids or work places. It is assumed that LED lamps
are synchronized for data transmission. It is assumed that the
receiving devices that contain photo diodes (PDs) as receivers
and are located on the desktop surface. This letter considers
line-of-sight (LOS) scenario for communication as well as
illumination.
This letter considers an SC-L-PPM scheme for modulation.
The structure of the SC-L-PPM includes two components,
namely, a subcarrier (SC) component and a DC component.
The symbol interval (T ) is divided into L equal time slots
(Ts = T /L). The optical signal is subcarrier during one of the
L slot (SC component) while the rest of the L − 1 slots (DC
component) have a constant amplitude value. Each symbol
corresponds to log2 L data bits, where the position of the
subcarrier corresponds to its decimal value. Fig. 2 illustrates
the signal waveform of the SC-4PPM; the amplitude of the
optical signal is given by (c − a) [8], and the amplitude of
DC component is given by b.
IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 26, NO. 8, APRIL 15, 2014
B. LED Illumination
The output luminous flux produced by an LED lamp can
be computed as
i = N × max (1)
where i is the lamp index, and max is the maximum luminous
flux for each LED lamp that is produced by an LED when
the input waveform only has a DC component with maximum
amplitude, i.e. ai = bi = ci = cmax , and cmax is the maximum
value of the amplitude of a waveform. N is the brightness
factor, which can be computed as
N = (τ1 × (a + c) + τ2 × b)/T (2)
where τ1 and τ2 are given by Ts /2 and 3Ts , respectively.
Equation (1) can be expressed as
i = (τ1 (ai + ci ) + τ2 × b) × max (3)
Brightness control ranging from 0% to 100% can be achieved
by changing the values of a, b, and c. 75% of brightness
control can be achieved, without affecting the communication,
by changing the value of b; the remaining 25% of brightness
control can be achieved by varying the values of a and c. Illu-
minance expresses the brightness of the illuminated surface,
let the illuminance level at work place j from all LED lamps
be denoted by E j , which can be computed by aggregating the
illuminance from each lamp. Then, E j is represented by

I
Ej = ei j (4)
i=1
where ei j is the illuminance received at work place j from
lamp i . Assuming a source with Lambert radiation character-
istics, we can model ei j as [9]
(m + 1)i
ei j = cos m (θ )cosψ (5)
2πr 2
where m is the Lambert index, r is the distance between the
LED and the PD, and θ and ψ are the angle of irradiance and
incidence, respectively. Let E rj denote the required illuminance
level at the center of work place j, then the illuminance level
at each work place must be greater E rj in order to satisfy
the user lighting requirements. The recommended illuminance
value for normal office work, PC work, study library and
laboratories is 400-500 lux.
C. Optical Communication
The transmitted optical power indicates the total energy
irradiated by an LED; it determines signal strength of the
optical communication [10]. To compute the signal strength of
an SC-LPPM signal, only the optical power transmitted during
the subcarrier component is considered; it can be computed as
Pit = M × Pmax
t
(6)
where Pit is the optical power transmitted by the i t h LED,
t
Pmax is the maximum transmitted power, and M is the optical
power factor, for an SC-4PPM waveform M is given by
(M = c − a). Considering wireless optical channel, the optical
DIN AND KIM: ENERGY-EFFICIENT BRIGHTNESS CONTROL AND DATA TRANSMISSION 783

power received at PD using the transmitted optical power can

be derived as follows:

I
P jr = (H (0) × Pit ) (7)
i=1
P jr indicates the optical power received at works place j , and
H (0) is the channel response; it can be computed for an LOS
channel as [11], [12]
Ar (m + 1)
H (0) = cos m (θ )cosψ (8)
2πr 2
where Ar is the effective receiver area. The received opti-
cal power, according to equations (6), (7), and (8), can be
represented as
Ar (m + 1)
Pir = (ci − ai ) × Pmax
t
cos m (θ )cosψ (9) Fig. 3. LEDs Lamps placement at ceiling.
2πr 2
The bit error rate (BER) is a key parameter used to assess the
communication system performance. The BER for SC-L-PPM
can be computed as
⎛  ⎞
L/2 3 Ar2 L(P jr )2 log2 L
BER = Q ⎝1/2 ⎠ (10)
L −1 N0 Rb

where N0 is the power spectrum density of additive white

gaussian noise (AWGN), and Rb is the bit rate. The power
required to achieve a given BER can be computed as
 
2 −1 L −1 N0 Rb
Preq = Q × BER (11)
Ar L/2 3L log2 L
To achieve a desired BER, the received power P jr should be
greater than or equal to Preq . Fig. 4. Illuminance distribution on the desktop surface.

D. Problem Formulation
expresses the objective function used to minimize the total
The objective of the proposed scheme is to minimize the luminous flux of the I lamps. Equations (13) and (14) present
total power consumption. It is assumed that the luminous the constraints for provision of the illuminance level and
flux is proportional to the input power. Minimizing the total communication signal quality at each work space, respectively.
luminous flux of LED lamps will minimize the total power The limited ranges of luminous flux and optical power of
consumption which is the objective of the proposed scheme. input waveform for each lamp are given by equation (15).
A problem is formulated to determine the optimal set of
parameters a, b, and c for the input SC-4PPM waveform that
III. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION
minimize the luminous flux of LED lamps while ensuring the
required communication and illuminance level. The optimiza- Simulations were performed to evaluate performance of the
tion problem is presented as a linear programming problem as proposed scheme. An indoor room environment as shown in
follows: Fig. 1 is considered for simulations. Four LED lamps, each
consists of 60×60 LEDs, are installed at a height of 3m above
Minimize 
I
the floor. The separation distance between the LEDs is 1cm.
(ai s, bi s, ci s) (τ1 × (ai + ci ) + τ2 × b) × max (12)
Fig. 3 shows the placement of the LED lamps at ceiling of
i=1
the room. The center luminous intensity of an LED is 0.73 cd,

I
Subject to (τ1 × (ai + ci ) + τ2 × bi ) × αi j ≥ E rj (13) and semi-angle at half power is 60 deg. The received optical
i=1
power and illuminance level at the center each work place,
and the total luminous flux of the lamps is computed. The

I
(ci − ai ) × βi j ≥ Preq (14) required illuminance level is considered to be 400 lux; the
i=1
BER is considered to be greater than 10−6 . The simulation
0 ≤ ai , bi , ci ≥ cmax (15) parameters are summarized in Table I [13], [14].
Figs. 4 and 5 show the illuminance and optical power
where αi j and βi j replace max (m+1)
2πr 2
cos m (θ )cosψ and distribution, respectively, computed on the desktop’s surface.
Ar (m+1)
Pmax 2πr 2 cos (θ )cosψ, respectively. Equation (12)
t m Figs. 4 and 5 indicate that sufficient illuminance and optical
784
Fig. 5. Optical power distribution on the desktop surface.
TABLE I
S IMULATION PARAMETERS
TABLE II
T OTAL L UMINOUS F LUX AND E NERGY S AVING FOR D IFFERENT
L EVELS OF R EQUIRED I LLUMINANCE
power are obtained throughout the room, which, therefore
satisfies the requirements for illumination and communication
throughout room.
Simulations were performed to demonstrate the total lumi-
nous flux of all the LED lamps for different levels of required
illuminance. The proposed scheme is compared with conven-
tional SC-4PPM scheme in terms of total luminous flux. The
conventional SC-4PPM scheme is considered to have fixed
modulation depths of a = 0, b = 1 and c = 1. Table II show
the total luminous flux of LED lamps for the required illumi-
nance levels of 400lux −1000lux, and energy savings achieved
IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 26, NO. 8, APRIL 15, 2014
compared to conventional SC-4PPM. The proposed scheme
reduces the total luminous flux of the luminaires, and achieves
improvement in lighting energy savings. The proposed scheme
satisfies the requirements for both illumination and com-
munication while consuming less power compared with the
conventional scheme. The proposed scheme can also satisfied
different required lighting levels at different work places.
IV. C ONCLUSION
This letter proposed a brightness control and data transmis-
sion scheme that efficiently minimizes the energy consump-
tion of a VLC system while satisfying users’ lighting and
communication requirements. Our proposed scheme replaces
the conventional iterative approach for brightness control by
computing the optimal parameters for the input waveform
of LED lamps, which reduces the total energy consumption
of LED lamps while ensuring the desired brightness and
communication link quality. The proposed scheme achieves
considerable improvements in energy saving of VLC system.
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