The article proves that common LEDs may act as photodetectors with limited sensitivity, if they are polarized with an appropriate reverse voltage. The measured responsivities are ranged between 0.002 and 0.156 A/W and they depend on the LED type. The only one exception are white (phosphorescent) LEDs which do not exhibit any photosensitivity. There have also shown that a bandwidth of LEDs, which were examined in a role of photodetectors, is of a few tens of MHz, which is an order of magnitude greater than their modulation bandwidth as transmitters. The reasons of the observed LEDs behaviour are explained theoretically. The obtained results are indicated that some of them may be used as both transmitters and receivers in the VLC links working in a bi-directional half-duplex mode.
The presented work proposes a new dimming control schemes for indoor visible light communication which combines variable pulse-position modulation, colour shift keying as key schemes of IEEE 802.15.7 standard, and sub carrier-pulse-position modulation as a pulse-position modulation variant with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. These schemes are then compared with traditional merging schemes utilizing pulse-width modulation and multiple pulse-position modulation with m-ary quadrature amplitude modulation OFDM. The proposed schemes are investigated in a typical room with a different lighting layout (i.e., distinctive and uniform lighting layout), followed by an illumination investigation to evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes, especially the enhanced achieved data rates, and to determine their limitations as reliable visible light communication systems that can satisfy both communication and illumination requirements.