Illumination Control in Visible Light Communication Using Manchester Code with Sync-Mark Signal

In this study, we employed Manchester code for illumination control and flicker prevention of the light-emitting diode (LED) used in a visible light communication (VLC) system. In the VLC transmitter, the duty factor of the Manchester code was utilized for illumination control; in the VLC receiver, the spike signal from an RC-high pass filter was utilized to recover the transmitted signal whilst suppressing the 120-Hz noise arising from adjacent lighting lamps. Instead of the clock being transmitted in a separate channel, a syncmark signal was transmitted in front of each data byte and used as the reference time for transforming the Manchester code to non-return-to-zero (NRZ) data in the receiver. In experiments, the LED illumination was controlled in the range of approximately 12-84% of the constant wave (CW) light via changing of the duty factor from 10% to 90%. This scheme is useful for constructing indoor wireless sensor networks using LED light that is flicker-free and presents capability for illumination control.