An optical design configuration for wireless data transmission

The concept of 2D barcodes is of great relevance for use in wireless data transmission between handheld electronic devices. In a typical setup, any file on a cell phone for example can be transferred to a second cell phone through a series of images on the LCD which are then captured and decoded through the camera of the second cell phone. In this research, a new approach for data modulation in 2D barcodes is introduced, and its performance is evaluated in comparison to other standard methods of barcode modulation. In the proposed method, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation is used together with Differential Phase Shift Keying (DPSK) over adjacent frequency domain elements to modulate intensity of individual pixels. It is shown that the bit error rate performance of the proposed system is superior to the current state of the art in various scenarios. A specific aim of this study is to establish a system that is proven tolerant to camera motion, picture blur and light leakage within neighboring pixels of an LCD. Furthermore, intensity modulation requires the input signal used to modulate a light source to be positive, which requires the addition of a dc bias. In the meantime, the high crest factor of OFDM requires a lower modulation index to limit clipping distortion. These two factors result in poor power efficiency in radio over fiber applications in which signal bandwidth is generally much less than the carrier frequency. In this study, it is shown that clipping a bipolar radio frequency signal at zero level, when it has a carrier frequency sufficiently higher than its bandwidth, results in negligible distortion in the pass band and most of the distortion power is concentrated in the baseband. Consequently, with less power provided to the optical carrier, higher power efficiencies and better receiver sensitivity will result. Finally, a more efficient optical integrated system is introduced to implement the proposed intensity modulation method which is optimized for radio over fiber applications