The use of infrared radiation to provide high speed indoor wireless communication has attracted considerable attention for over a decade. In previous studies we proposed a novel full-duplex indoor optical wireless communication system with high-speed data transmission and limited mobility can be provided to users. When it is incorporated with localization function, gigabit mobile communication can be provided over the entire room. In this paper we theoretically analyze the limiting factor of our proposed system - background light induced shot noise. A theoretical model that allows the receiver sensitivity and the corresponding power penalty is proposed and the model is validated by experiments. Experimental results show that for both down-link and up-link transmission the background light will result in several dB power penalty and it is more dominant in lower speed links. As the bit rate increases, the preamplifier induced noise becomes larger and eventually dominates the noise process.
© 2011 Optical Society of America