Towards self-powered solar panel receiver for optical wireless communication

In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of optical wireless communication (OWC) systems with a solar panel as a photo-detector. The advantage of a solar panel is that it is a passive device, which does not require an additional power supply for converting the received light signal into an electrical signal. The frequency response of a solar panel shows that its 3-dB modulation bandwidth is 350 kHz. The results demonstrate that for a 1-Mbit/s on-off keying signal, a bit error rate of less than 2 × 10^-3 could be achieved when the average irradiance on the solar panel is 3.5 × 10^-4 W/cm². In the current experimental setup, this corresponds to a transmission distance of 39 cm. A data rate of 7.01 Mbit/s is achieved by using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. In addition, the feasibility of using the solar panel for simultaneous communication and energy harvesting is investigated. A load is connected in parallel to the receiver circuit in order to simulate the conditions of charging a battery by using the received signal´s DC component. It is shown that the load does not hamper the communication capabilities. Hence, an OWC system with a solar-panel-based receiver can satisfy the requirements of simultaneous communication and energy harvesting.