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Visible light communication (VLC) has gained relevance during the last few years. It consists in using high-brightness LEDs (HB-LEDs) both for lighting and transmitting information by changing the light intensity rapidly. However, there are some bottlenecks that are slowing down the deployment of this technology. One of the most important problems is that the HB-LED drivers proposed for addressing high data rates in VLC achieve poor power efficiency. Since these HB-LED drivers must be able to reproduce fast current waveforms, the use of linear power amplifiers has been adopted, which clearly damages the power efficiency of HB-LED lighting. In order to alleviate this problem, an HB-LED driver made up of two DC–DC power converters is presented in this work. One of them is responsible for performing the communication functionality by operating at high switching frequency (10 MHz), whereas the second converter fulfills the illumination functionality by ensuring a certain biasing point. The split of the power allows us to minimize the power delivered by the fast-response DC–DC power converter, which suffers from high switching losses. Thus, the overall efficiency can be maximized for each particular communication scenario and for scenarios with changing conditions (i.e., mobile transmitter and/or receiver, presence of mobile obstacles, etc.). In this sense, how the lighting level and the communication signal power affect both the power efficiency and the communication efficiency is deeply analyzed in the experimental section. The implemented prototype achieves an overall efficiency around 90%. In addition, the proposed VLC transmitter is able to reproduce a wide range of digital modulation schemes, including the preferred one for wireless communications: orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dc–dc power converter based on a two-phase synchronous buck converter that reproduces single-carrier digital modulation schemes by controlling the first switching harmonic of the output voltage ripple is presented in this paper. The dc–dc power converter carries out both the lighting and the transmission functionalities of visible light communication transmitters. Control of both the amplitude and the phase of sinusoidal currents injected toward high-brightness LEDs enable the use of efficient modulation schemes, such as quadrature amplitude modulation, carrierless amplitude and phase modulation, amplitude-shift keying, and phase-shift keying. These modulation schemes achieve higher spectral efficiency (i.e., more data can be transmitted using the same bandwidth) than previously proposed modulation schemes performed by visible light communication transmitters based on the use of dc–dc power converters. To the authors' knowledge, the ratio between the bit rate achieved and the switching frequency of the dc–dc power converter presented in this paper is the highest that can be found in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]