A flexible OLED VLC system for an office environment

Abstract

The potential use of flexible substrate-based organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) as curved or rolled lighting sources offers news opportunities for the implementation of visible light communications (VLC) in indoor environments. This paper outlines the use of such a system in a furnished office and investigates the impact of the beam pattern of OLED, which is symmetrical and wider than Lambertian, on the VLC system. We present new results of the VLC system performance in terms of the root-mean-square delay spread and the bit error rate (BER) for the link using both flat and half-circular OLEDs. We demonstrate a data rate of 4 Mb/s using both the curved and flat OLEDs for the transmitter's half-angle within the range of ±90° and ±53°, respectively with a BER below the forward error correction BER limit.