Laser-Diode LiFi With Diffused-Beam Optics: System-Level Modeling and a Cross-Validated ns-3 Simulation Framework
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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY
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Laser-Diode LiFi With Diffused-Beam Optics: System-Level Modeling and a Cross-Validated ns-3 Simulation Framework
arXiv:2608.10950v1 [eess.SP] 11 Aug 2026
Hussain Ahmad, Syed Muhammad Talha Gillani, Toheed Omer, and Saleem Aslam
Abstract—Laser diodes (LDs) promise an order-of-magnitude bandwidth advantage over light-emitting diodes for indoor optical wireless access, but reported prototype studies frequently leave the gap between hardware demonstrations and system-level performance unquantified. This paper develops a complete, reproducible system model of a diffused-beam LD LiFi transceiver— a 500-mW laser source beam-shaped by a holographic diffuser, an intensity-modulation/ direct-detection (IM/DD) receiver, and adaptive M -QAM signaling—and embeds it in two crossvalidated simulators: an open ns-3 module providing full-stack network simulation (channel, PHY, ARQ MAC, NetDevice, IP/UDP/TCP) and a Python link-level engine used for MonteCarlo validation of all analytical error models. Starting from a hardware prototype that transferred data, real-time voice, and images over a 14-m line-of-sight link, we identify and close the technical gaps typical of prototype-class reports: serial-interface throughput ceilings misread as optical-link capacity, absent noise modeling, unmeasurable error floors, and unexamined beamwidth/coverage trade-offs. The framework shows that the same optical front end, freed of its 2-Mbaud UART bottleneck and driven at its 250-MHz electrical bandwidth, supports 930 Mb/s net at 14 m under a 3.8×10−3 HD-FEC threshold with 16-QAM, scales to 1.86 Gb/s at 5 m with 256-QAM, and sustains on-off keying to 23.3 m; a 20◦ diffuser covers a 4.2-m-radius cell of a standard room at desk height. Network simulations over the ns-3 stack yield saturation goodput within 7% of the PHY line rate and sub-0.11-ms 99th-percentile latency at 70% load. All models, code, and figures are released for reproduction. Index Terms—Visible light communication, LiFi, laser diode, holographic diffuser, intensity modulation, direct detection, ns3, network simulation, adaptive modulation, optical wireless communication.
I. I NTRODUCTION HE radio spectrum below 300 GHz is a congested, regulated and increasingly contested resource, while the optical spectrum offers roughly 104 times more bandwidth, is license-free, and is naturally confined by opaque boundaries— an attractive property for both spatial reuse and physical-layer security [1]–[3]. LiFi extends visible light communication (VLC) from a point-to-point physical layer into a networked, multi-user wireless access technology [3], [4]. Within optical wireless, the choice of emitter fundamentally constrains the achievable rate. Phosphor-converted white LEDs are inexpensive and eye-safe, but their 3-dB electrical bandwidth of a few to a few tens of MHz limits single-emitter rates
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H. Ahmad, S. M. T. Gillani, T. Omer, and S. Aslam are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan (e-mail: hussainbuic@gmail.com). Simulation code (ns-3 module and Python link-level engine) is available with this article.
and forces heavy spectral-efficiency engineering [5]–[7]. Laser diodes (LDs), by contrast, exhibit modulation bandwidths in the hundreds of MHz to GHz range and much higher electricalto-optical conversion linearity at high current densities; GaN LDs have carried 9 Gb/s over a single 450-nm channel [8], white-light LD lamps have delivered multi-Gb/s illuminationgrade links [9], [10], and LD-based underwater links have reached 1.5 Gb/s over 20 m [11], [12]. The principal objections to LDs—speckle, eye safety, and narrow beams— are addressed by diffusive beam shaping: a holographic diffuser converts the coherent beam into an extended, eye-safer Lambertian-like source with a designer-chosen half-angle [13]. This paper builds on a working LD-LiFi hardware prototype developed by the authors: a 500-mW laser source switched by an N-channel MOSFET driver fed from a CH340 USB– TTL serial bridge, beam-shaped by a holographic diffuser, and received by a photodiode/laser-sensor front end, with modulation and demodulation performed in MATLAB. The prototype transferred arbitrary data, real-time voice, and 69 × 71-pixel images over a 14-m indoor line-of-sight (LOS) link. Such prototype-class studies—common in the LiFi literature— demonstrate feasibility but typically leave four technical gaps that prevent their results from being extrapolated or reproduced: 1) Interface-limited throughput is conflated with link capacity. A serial bridge capped at 2 Mbaud bounds goodput at 1.6 Mb/s regardless of the optics; timingbased rate estimates taken at the application layer can exceed this by orders of magnitude and must not be attributed to the optical channel. 2) No noise model. Without shot- and thermal-noise budgets, the observation of “error-free” operation at one distance carries no information about margins, achievable modulation orders, or scaling. 3) No error-rate methodology. Short qualitative tests cannot resolve bit-error rates (BERs) at or below forward-errorcorrection (FEC) thresholds; a BER-versus-distance characterization requires either long measurements or a validated model. 4) Unexplored design space. The diffuser half-angle trades peak SNR against coverage; transmit power trades range against eye safety; modulation order trades rate against reach. None of these trade-offs can be quantified from a single hardware operating point.
JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY
A. Contributions We close these gaps by lifting the prototype into a complete, validated system model and simulation framework: • Link model. A closed-form IM/DD link budget for diffused-beam LD LiFi: generalized-Lambertian LOS channel parameterized by the diffuser semi-angle, optical filtering and non-imaging concentration, shot plus TIA thermal noise, and Gray-mapped M -QAM/OOK error models against a 7%-overhead hard-decision FEC threshold (Sections IV–V). • An open ns-3 module. lifi implements the channel, PHY, stop-and-wait ARQ MAC, and NetDevice abstractions so that unmodified IPv4/UDP/TCP stacks, applications, and FlowMonitor instrumentation run over the optical link; mobility-model-driven geometry makes coverage and mobility studies native (Section VI). • Cross-validation. A Python link-level engine implements the identical equations and validates every analytical BER curve by Monte-Carlo simulation; the ns-3 test suite asserts numerical agreement between the two implementations to 0.1% (Section VI). • Quantified design space. BER/SNR/rate versus distance, power, and diffuser angle; room-scale coverage maps; image-transfer fidelity; and full-stack goodput/latency (Section VII). • Prototype forensics. A quantitative account of what the hardware prototype did and did not establish, including the UART ceiling analysis that reconciles applicationlayer rate estimates with the physical link (Section VIII). II. R ELATED W ORK Kahn and Barry’s treatment of indoor infrared links established the generalized-Lambertian LOS model and IM/DD noise analysis that underpin modern VLC link budgets [14]; Komine and Nakagawa adapted it to white-LED lighting [15], and Ghassemlooy et al. give a comprehensive modeling treatment [16]. Surveys position LiFi within optical wireless technologies [1], [2], [5], and IEEE 802.15.7 standardizes short-range optical PHY/MAC layers [17]. On the emitter side, LED links progressed from 3 Gb/s single µLED [6] to 10 Gb/s-class violet µLED OFDM [7], while LD links demonstrated 9 Gb/s QAM-OFDM at 450 nm [8], illumination-grade white lasing links [9], [10], real-time Gb/s LiFi transceivers [18], and long-reach underwater links [11], [12]. Zafar et al. argue the LD roadmap for gigabit-class VLC [13]. Ray-traced indoor studies quantify realistic mobile multi-gigabit environments [19], receiver-side innovations include µ-photodetectors [20] and organic detectors with neural equalization [21], and multi-user beam control has been demonstrated with compound-eye transmitters [22]. At the network level, ns-3 [23] is the reference discreteevent simulator for wireless protocol research, and VLC modules for LED links have been proposed [24]. To our knowledge, no published ns-3 module models laser-diode LiFi with diffuser-parameterized beam shaping, nor pairs the network simulator with an independently implemented, Monte-Carlovalidated link engine. This paper fills that gap and anchors the model to a physical prototype.
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III. S YSTEM A RCHITECTURE Fig. 1 shows the system. A data source feeds a digital modulator; the resulting intensity waveform switches the LD through a MOSFET driver. The coherent beam passes a holographic diffuser that (i) destroys spatial coherence, easing eye-safety constraints of the extended source [13], [25], and (ii) shapes the emission into an approximately Lambertian lobe of order m set by the semi-angle at half power Φ1/2 . At the receiver, a non-imaging concentrator and optical filter collect light onto a photodiode; a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) converts photocurrent to voltage; the demodulator recovers bits, protected by hard-decision FEC. The hardware prototype realized this chain at reduced scale: a CH340 USB–TTL bridge (maximum 2 Mbaud) drove the MOSFET gate, MATLAB performed (de)modulation offline, and a laser-sensor module served as receiver. The prototype verified end-to-end data, real-time voice, and image transfer at 14 m indoors. Section VIII quantifies exactly which performance claims that hardware can and cannot support. IV. O PTICAL C HANNEL AND R ECEIVER M ODEL A. LOS Channel Gain The diffused LD emission is modeled as a generalized Lambertian source of order ln 2 , (1) m=− ln cos Φ1/2 so that Φ1/2 = 60◦ gives m = 1 (ideal Lambertian) while Φ1/2 = 20◦ gives m = 11.14, concentrating power near boresight. For a receiver of physical area A at distance d, emission angle ϕ and incidence angle ψ, the DC channel gain is [14], [15] (m + 1)A cosm ϕ T g(ψ) cos ψ, 0 ≤ ψ ≤ Ψ , s c 2πd2 H(0) = 0, ψ > Ψc , (2) where Ts is the optical filter transmission and the non-imaging concentrator of refractive index n and field-of-view semi-angle Ψc contributes g(ψ) =
n2 , sin2 Ψc
0 ≤ ψ ≤ Ψc .
(3)
The received optical power is Pr = H(0) Pt . B. Receiver Noise and SNR Direct detection converts Pr into photocurrent Iph = RPr with responsivity R. Over receiver bandwidth B, shot noise (including a background-light current Ibg ) and TIA thermal noise contribute 2 σsh = 2q (Iph + Ibg ) B, 4kB T 2 σth = B, Rf
(4) (5)
yielding the electrical SNR γ=
(RPr )2 2 + σ2 . σsh th
(6)
JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY
Data / voice / image source
Modulation (OOK–256-QAM)
MOSFET LD driver
3
500-mW laser diode
Holographic diffuser Φ1/2
electrical
LOS Lambertian channel H(0)
TIA Rf
Photodiode + concentrator
optical, free space
Demodulation + FEC
Data sink
electrical
Fig. 1. Diffused-beam LD LiFi transceiver architecture. In the hardware prototype the modulation/demodulation blocks run in MATLAB behind a CH340 USB–TTL bridge; in the simulation framework they are the LifiPhy abstraction driven at the LD’s full electrical bandwidth.
TABLE I S YSTEM PARAMETERS (P ROTOTYPE -D ERIVED D EFAULTS ) Meaning
Value
Pt Φ1/2 A R Ts n Ψc B Ibg T Rf FEC
transmit optical power diffuser semi-angle photodetector area responsivity filter transmission concentrator index receiver field of view electrical bandwidth background photocurrent receiver temperature TIA feedback resistance HD-FEC threshold / overhead
500 mW 20◦ –60◦ 1 cm2 0.6 A/W 0.9 1.5 70◦ 250 MHz 100 µA 298 K 10 kΩ 3.8 × 10−3 / 7%
Table I lists the parameter set, chosen to match the prototype’s components scaled to the LD’s full electrical bandwidth. With these values the link is background-shot-noise limited: at 14 m and Φ1/2 = 20◦ , Pr = 1.13 µW and γ = 17.3 dB. V. M ODULATION AND E RROR M ODELS The PHY supports OOK, BPSK, QPSK, and square 16/64-/256-QAM on an electrical subcarrier (DC-biased for unipolarity), all at symbol rate B. With Gray mapping, the standard electrical-domain error probabilities apply [16]: for √ √ OOK Pb = Q( γ), for BPSK Pb = Q( 2γb ), and for square M -QAM ! r 4 3γ 1 Pb ≈ . (7) 1 − √M Q log2 M M −1 A rate-(1 − ρ) hard-decision FEC with ρ = 7% overhead corrects any pre-FEC BER at or below 3.8×10−3 ; the net rate of modulation M is then Rnet = B log2 M (1−ρ) when Pb ≤ 3.8 × 10−3 and the link is in outage otherwise. The adaptiverate policy selects the highest-order modulation meeting the threshold. Every closed-form curve used in this paper is verified by Monte-Carlo simulation of at least 1.2 × 106 bits per point in the Python engine (Section VI); Fig. 2 overlays the MonteCarlo estimates (markers) on the analytical curves (lines).