An aeronautical visible light communication system to enable in-flight connectivity

Abstract

This paper proposes an aeronautical network architecture based on visible light communication (VLC) technology which targets the distribution of in-flight entertainment services. To this purpose, we investigate the deployment of LEDs within an aircraft cabin using two different wavelength assignment methods in the VLC cells. The first method combines both WDM and Direct sequence OCDMA techniques to reduce intra-cell and inter-cell interferences. In the second one, a two-dimensional OCDMA scheme is used to enable efficient sharing of resources between users. Moreover, an FSO-based inter-VLC-cells communication scheme is described to enable connectivity distribution among LEDs and inter-cells handover. This scheme is based on all-optical switching using code-words that uniquely identify the cells. Finally, a simulation work is conducted to evaluate the bit error rate of the proposed access control schemes for different configurations of the VLC system.