Is blue optical filter necessary in high speed phosphor-based white light LED visible light communications?

Optical blue filter is usually regarded as a critical optical component for high speed phosphor-based white light emitting diode (LED) visible-light-communication (VLC). However, the optical blue filter plays different roles in VLC when using modulations of on-off keying (OOK) or discrete multi-tone (DMT). We show that in the DMT VLC system, the blue optical filter may be unnecessary, and even degrade the transmission performance (by reducing the optical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)). Analyses and verifications by experiments are performed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the function of blue filters in VLC is explicitly analyzed.