Densely deployed light emitting diodes (LEDs) typically lead to high spatial correlation in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) visible light communication (VLC) systems. Although precoding can effectively alleviate the spatial correlation issue, most existing precoding algorithms require a dedicated baseband chain for each LED, leading to high energy consumption and hardware complexity when a large number of LEDs are used. In this paper, a successive interference cancellation (SIC)-based precoding scheme with sub-connected architecture (SIC-SA) is proposed. In the considered model, each baseband chain is connected to an LED sub-array containing multiple LEDs to reduce the complexity. Since, in this case, SIC-based precoding can only determine the signal of each baseband chain for an LED sub-array, while its target is to mitigate the spatial correlation between individual LEDs, the electrical/optical power of each LED must also be jointly optimized to accomplish the target. This joint SIC-based precoding, power allocation, and direct current offset design problem is formulated as an achievable sum rate maximization problem under dimming control and electrical power constraints. A two-step iterative algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. In the first step, the SIC-based precoding is designed to alleviate the multi-user interference. In the second step, the power allocation of LEDs is optimized by matrix decomposition and convex optimization, and a closed-form solution of DC offset is derived. Furthermore, considering the dynamic scenarios, a SIC-based precoding scheme with dynamic sub-connected architecture (SIC-DSA) is proposed, in which a switch network is used to adaptively adjust the LED sub-array structure based on the channel state information. Simulation results show that the proposed SIC-SA and SIC-DSA respectively achieve 0.1340 bps/Hz/W and 0.1305 bps/Hz/W energy efficiency gains over the zero-forcing precoding scheme with SA, when the signal-to-noise ratio is 30 dB.
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