A novel illumination‐efficient dimming control scheme based on reversed unipolar return‐to‐zero coding and circular (7, 1) modulation in high‐speed visible light communication

Abstract

AbstractVisible light communication (VLC) is an emerging optical wireless communication, which combines lighting and communication simultaneously. In indoor VLC systems, the brightness of LEDs should be dimmed to a certain level to support the illumination function. In this article, we propose a novel dimming control scheme based on Reversed Unipolar Return‐to‐Zero (RURZ) coding and circular (7, 1) modulation. The dimming level is determined by the duty cycle ratio (DCR) of the RURZ codes. Contrary to traditional RZ coding, with the decrease of DCR, the component of high‐level signal in RURZ codes increases and could constantly keep LEDs on. Therefore, when the DCR is smaller, the time that the LED is on keeps longer and the illumination efficiency is higher. A special shaped 8‐QAM modulation scheme called circular (7, 1) is employed to obtain a wider dimming range and higher communication quality for its superiority in operation range and bit error ratio (BER) performance. Furthermore, pulse shaping technology is utilized to suppress the wide spectrum extended by RURZ coding and increase the spectral efficiency (SE) and the data rate. Theoretical analysis and experimental investigation demonstrate that the RURZ coded and circular (7, 1) modulated VLC system could achieve a wide dimming range with high illumination efficiency and high communication speed. An illumination efficiency improvement of 0.63 is successfully achieved at 30% DCR with a data rate of 1.35 GB/s over 1 m free space transmission.