BER analysis and power control for interfering visible light communication systems

Abstract

This paper studies the error performance of visible light communication systems consisting of multiple transmitter–receiver pairs, where mutual interference exists. Unlike the traditional method which approximates the interference signal as a Gaussian random process and express the bit error rate (BER) as a function of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise power ratio (SINR), we conduct a detailed analysis that captures the signal structure of the interference in terms of the number of light sources, and derive the BER explicitly. Simulation results show that under a realistic small-room scenario with basic illumination requirement, the BER predicted by the Gaussian model is much higher than the exact BER. To provide an alternative metric for resource allocation purpose, we also propose a new approximate expression for the BER. A power control problem is further investigated to ensure that the system is operated in an effective manner.