  We present a complete Visible Light Communications (VLC) transceiver system
consisting of low-cost Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components. In
particular, we show that COTS IEEE 802.11n (WiFi) devices can be used so that
the physical and data link layers of radio frequency (RF) WiFi, i.e. 2.4 GHz,
are reused for VLC. Moreover, as WiFi is fully integrated with the Linux
system, higher protocols from network to transport and application layer can be
used and tested in VLC-related experiments. Our approach has the advantage that
a VLC experimenter can fully focus on VLC-related low-level aspects like the
design of novel VLC front-ends, e.g. LED drivers, lenses, and photodetectors
and test their impact directly on the full network protocol stack in an
end-to-end manner with real applications like adaptive video streaming. We
present first results from experiments using our prototype showing the
performance of unidirectional VLC transmission. Here we analyze the distortions
introduced as well as the relationship between signal strength on frame error
rate for different MCS and the maximum communication distance. Experimental
results reveal that a data rate of up to 150 Mbps is possible over short
ranges.
