Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging wireless technology that offers more capacity than legacy radio fre-quency (RF) communications can offer. Free-space-optical (FSO) communication is VLC's general form spanning in-frared bands, and it has an upper hand on traditional RF systems due to license-free spectrum, containment of beams, inherent security, energy efficient communications, and high transmission rates. In this paper, we consider a hybrid RF/FSO mechanism to transmit multiple data streams over multi-element VLC modules. We evaluate the link quality performance of a novel multi-element hemispherical design that can simultaneously provide good lighting and commu-nication coverage across a room.
