Design of an optical receiving antenna with high gain and large field of view for indoor visible light communication

In order to meet the requirements of the high gain and wide field of view (FOV) for indoor visible light communication (VLC) system, a new optical receiving system is proposed, which integrates a Fresnel lens with a hemispherical lens. The effects of the two lenses’ spacing and the radius of the hemispherical lens on the optical gain at different FOV are investigated. As the FOV increases, the designed antenna displays enhanced reception performance compared with the traditional receiving optical antenna. The optical gain of the designed antenna is 6.88 in the condition of FOV of 40°. To further verify the rationality of the designed antenna, a model of VLC system is established based on the designed antenna in a room with a size of 5 m×5 m×3 m. The results show that the received average power using the designed antenna increases by 22.81 dBm, and the average signal to noise ratio (SNR) is 2.3 times of that without any optical antenna. The designed antenna is promising for the application in indoor VLC systems.