Visible Light Communication Channel Research Articles

VLC channel model in underground mining scenarios with the extinction effect and shadowing effect

In this work, a novel, to our knowledge, visible light communication (VLC) channel model is proposed for underground mining scenarios taking into account the impact of coal dust particles and obstacles. Specifically, the extinction effect of the coal dust particles is analyzed on the basis of the Mie theory, and the quantitative formula of the influence on channel direct current (DC) gain is derived. Meanwhile, the effect of a random shadowing phenomenon is investigated and quantified with the geometric and statistical model considering the position, size, and shape of the obstacles. The channel impulse response, path loss, root mean square delay spread, and bit error rate (BER) are further investigated in two different underground mining scenarios, namely, a mining roadway and coal mine working face. Simulation results show that the shadowing effect plays a major role in the influence of DC gain attenuation. Furthermore, the BER performance is noticeably degraded due to the presence of coal dust particles and obstacles, especially when the receiver is located far from the transmitter. This work will benefit the design of the VLC systems in underground mines.

Method for evaluation of the optical uniformity distribution in the white LEDs-based visible light communication applications

The uniformity characteristic of emitted radiation in VLC applications is a factor that can affect the efficiency of a detector and the overall efficiency of the VLC system. In this paper, we theoretically investigate the optical uniformity characteristic of using LEDs in VLC applications in terms of the parameter of the emission angle of LEDs and the spatial distribution of LEDs. The result indicates that the optical uniformity can be controlled at a high level by controlling the emission angle of the LED or distributing the LEDs in the room's space. Full Text: PDF References E.-F. Schubert, J.-K. Kim, "Solid-State Light Sources Getting Smart", Science 308, 1274 (2005). CrossRef N. Narendran, Y. Gu, "Life of LED-based white light sources", J. Display Technol. 1, 167 (2005). CrossRef E. Schubert, Light-Emitting Diodes (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press 2006). CrossRef C.C. Sun, Q.K. Nguyen, T.X. Lee, S.K. Lin, C.S. Wu, T.H. Yang, Y.W. Yu, "Active thermal-fuse for stopping blue light leakage of white light-emitting diodes driven by constant current", Sci. Reports 12, 12433 (2022). CrossRef Z. Ghassemlooy, W. Popoola, S. Rajbhandari. Optical Wireless Communications System and Channel Modelling with MATLAB (Florida, CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013). CrossRef A. Burton, H. Le Minh, Z. Ghasemlooy, S. Rajbhandari, "A study of LED lumination uniformity with mobility for visible light communications", IEEE 2012 Int. Workshop on Opt. Wireless Comm. (IWOW), Pisa, Italy, 2012. CrossRef M.S.M. Gismalla, M.F.L. Abdullah, M.I. Niass, B. Das, W.A. Mabrouk. "Effect of optical attocells deployment on the RMSD spread in indoor visible light communication systems", Int. J. Commun Syst. e4349 (2020). CrossRef C. Wang, J. Wang, J. Zhang, J. Wang, H. Du, J. Wang, "Research on uniform illumination distribution of indoor visible light communication", Proc. SPIE 12062, AOPC 2021: Optoelectronics and Nanophotonics (2021). CrossRef M.V. Bhalerao, M. Sumathi, S.S. Sonavane. "Line of sight model for visible light communication using Lambertian radiation pattern of LED", Int. J. Comm. Systems (2016). CrossRef J.F. Zang, Y. Piao. "Research on visible light communication system based on white LEDs", Proc. SPIE 10255, (2016). CrossRef M. Oliveira, F.C.B. Tosta, D.E.F. Guillen, P.P. Monteiro, A.A.P. Poh, "Theoretical and Experimental Analysis of LED Lamp for Visible Light Communications", Wireless Personal Communications 125, 3461(2022). CrossRef J.P. Ding, C. Lin, J.T. Wang, H. Yang, "Effects of Optical Beams on MIMO Visible Light Communication Channel Characteristics", Sensors 22, 216 (2022). CrossRef X. Zhang , N. Zhao, F. Al-Turjman, M.B. Khan, X. Yang. "An Optimization of the Signal-to-Noise Ratio Distribution of an Indoor Visible Light Communication System Based on the Conventional Layout Model", Sustainability 12, 9006 (2020). CrossRef A. Kaewpukdee, P. Uthansakul, "Characteristic of Line-of-Sight in Infrastructure-to-Vehicle Visible Light Communication Using MIMO Technique", Materials Continua 74, 1026 (2023). CrossRef

Multi-Wavelength Path Loss Model for Indoor VLC with Mobile Human Blockage

Visible light communication (VLC) is one of the candidate technologies for the sixth generation (6G) networks. The path loss model is particularly important for link budget estimation and network planning in VLC. Due to the wideband nature and the extremely poor diffraction capacity of light, the path loss of the VLC channel is susceptible to wavelength dependence and blockage effect. In this paper, we propose a novel path loss model which can characterize the impact of wavelength dependence combined with mobile human blockage for both the single-LED (light emitting diode) and the multi-LED scenario. When there is no blockage in the channel, the multi-wavelength path loss under free space propagation is modeled with a small standard deviation of 0.262 in the single-LED scenario and a small root mean square error of 0.009 in the multi-LED scenario which indicates the high accuracy of the model. When considering the mobile human blockage, the blockage probability (BP) is modeled with full consideration of realistic human mobility and human body shadowing. The results indicate that the BP in single-LED scenario can reach 0.08, while the BP in multi-LED scenario is 0.022. This demonstrates that the distributed deployment of transmitters can effectively reduce the occurrence of the blockage state in VLC.

CNN neural network temporal feature storage structure fusion for the visible channel equalization algorithm

The visible light communication channel has time-varying characteristics and is difficult to predict. This paper proposes an equalization algorithm based on the structure of a convolutional neural network (CNN), combining time series feature length and long short-term memory (LSTM), and adding a residual structure. It can be seen that the equalization coefficient vector of the optical channel is a time series, which can reflect the noise characteristics of the channel and has storage characteristics. The equalizer algorithm can accurately learn the complex channel characteristics and calculate the compensation coefficient according to the channel characteristics. It can also restore the original transmission signal. At the same time, this paper also examines the compensation method of the receiver in the mobile state. The long-term memory parameters of LSTM are used to represent the sequence causality in the memory channel, and CNN and residual structure are used to refine the results and improve the accuracy of the reconstruction. The simulation results show that the algorithm can effectively eliminate the influence of the fading characteristics of the visible optical channel, improve the bit error rate performance of system transmission, solve the overall problem of channel corruption, and precisely restore the original transmission signal with fast convergence speed. In addition, this method can achieve a better balance between performance and complexity compared to the traditional contention balancing method, which proves the potential and effectiveness of the proposed channel balancing method.

On the performance of delta sigma modulators for DCO-OFDM based NOMA visible light communication systems

The revolution of the solid-state lighting technology and the looming radio frequency (RF) spectrum crisis enabled the rapid evolution of visible light communication (VLC) in the recent times. To furnish contemporaneous illumination and communication, VLC relies on white light emitting diodes (WLEDs). However, the limited modulation bandwidth of WLEDs poses a threat to VLC as the achievable data rates are drastically minimized. Eventually, to enhance the achievable throughput, the pre-eminent way is to apply orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to a VLC system. Furthermore, a VLC system can also exploit non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme to bestow with seamless services to the multiple users. However, much similar to the RF-based OFDM system, the OFDM-VLC system also inherits one of the serious disadvantages like the high peak to average power ratio (PAPR). In addition, the rapid fluctuations of the continuous time-domain signal amplitude in DC-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) results in much complicated design of the LED driver circuitry for driving the LED. Thus, to overcome such drawbacks, we incorporate delta-sigma modulators (DSM) to the NOMA-VLC system which is making use of DCO-OFDM, and we analyze its performance over VLC channel environment. The stunning advantage imparted by the proposed DSM-based DCO-OFDM-NOMA-VLC system is that the continuous amplitude of the time-domain transmitted signal is converted into two levels for driving the LED. Additionally, with the major goal to maximize the sum throughput of the proposed multiuser VLC system by taking into consideration both the user fairness as well as the intensity constraints, we derived the optimal values for the power allocation coefficients corresponding to the fair power allocation algorithm. Furthermore, the dynamically varying fair power allocation algorithm is compared with the fixed/static power allocation algorithm. The major contribution of this work is of two-fold: firstly, the proposed DCO-OFDM-NOMA-VLC system which is making use of DSM exhibits a remarkable reduction in PAPR when compared with the conventional system without the application of DSM, where the proposed system demonstrates a significant gain of 4.78 dB in terms of PAPR reduction. Secondly, from the simulated results it can affirmed that the proposed system not only achieves enhanced sum rates and better outage performance but also imparts a better bit error ratio (BER) performance corresponding to the far user.

Capacity and Achievable Rate Analysis for Visible Light Communication Channels

Capacity and Achievable Rate Analysis for Visible Light Communication Channels

Integrated physical-layer secure visible light communication and positioning system based on polar codes

Visible light communication (VLC) with physical-layer security can provide information-theoretic security for the optical wireless channel based on the characteristics of the channel instead of encryption algorithms and secret keys at application layer. Since precise location information of communication parties is crucial for estimating channel states and designing secure communication schemes, this paper proposes an integrated visible light communication and positioning system which provides triple functionalities of high-accuracy indoor positioning, physical-layer secure visible light communication, and flicker mitigation illumination. A heterogeneous signal hybrid line coding scheme is proposed for the transmitter to converge the high-speed communication data signals and the low-speed positioning data signals, and a hybrid heterogeneous signal extraction scheme is proposed for the receiver to separate the hybrid heterogeneous signals with a high-bandwidth photodetector and a low-pass complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor. Based on the positioning information and the communication scheme, a polar codes-based forward error correction coding scheme is designed to achieve physical-layer security and transmission reliability simultaneously. Numerical results show that the proposed system can reach a secrecy code rate of 0.76 for a single-input single-output indoor VLC channel and a transmission efficiency of 0.38 without perceivable flicker. Experimental results show that the proposed system can achieve an average positioning accuracy of 3.35 cm and decrease the bit error rate of a legitimate receiver to a near error-free level (lower than 10−7) while keeping the bit error rate of an eavesdropper at 0.4887 (nearly 0.5) with a transmission data rate of 1 Mbps, resulting in near-zero suppression of the eavesdropped information and a high secrecy capacity of 0.9994.

Vector Coding Optical Wireless Links

The quasi-static nature of the optical wireless channel means that the channel state information (CSI) can be readily available at the transmitter and receiver prior to data transmission. This implies that electrically band-limited optical wireless communication (OWC) systems can make use of optimal channel partitioning or vector coding based multi-channel modulation (MCM) to achieve high throughput by mitigating the non-linearities arising from the optical and electrical channel. This paper proposes a pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) based DC-biased optical vector coding (DCO-VC) MCM scheme for OWC. The throughput performance of DCO-VC is evaluated and compared to the well known DC-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) over hybrid (line-of-sight and diffuse) and diffuse (non line-of-sight only) visible light communication (VLC) channels with additive white Gaussian noise. For the completeness of the VLC physical layer, the performance comparison is based on an uncoded and a forward error correction transmission mode using well-known convolutional codes with Viterbi decoder. The results show that the coded DCO-VC outperforms DCO-OFDM system by achieving up to 2 and 3 dB signal to noise ratio gains over hybrid and diffuse VLC channels, respectively.

SLIPT-Enabled Multi-LED MU-MISO VLC Networks: Joint Beamforming and DC Bias Optimization

This paper studies a simultaneous lightwave information and power transfer (SLIPT)-enabled multi-user (MU) multiple input single output (MISO) visible light communication (VLC) network, where multiple user equipments (UEs) are simultaneously allowed to receive information by the photodiode (PD) and harvest energy by the solar panel, respectively. To improve the system spectral efficiency, an achievable sum rate maximization problem is formulated subject to the minimum energy harvesting (EH) requirement of each UE, the total transmit power constraint of the LEDs and the dimming control constraint of the LEDs, by jointly optimizing the beamforming vector and the direct current (DC) bias vector of the LEDs. To be general, the practical non-linear EH model and the information capacity model of the VLC channel are adopted. To solve the non-convex optimization problem, the objective function is equivalently transformed at first by using the epigraph reformulation, and then the transformed problem is relaxed with the semi-definite relaxation (SDR) method. Based on this, an iterative algorithm is designed to approximately obtain the maximal achievable sum rate based on the successive convex approximation (SCA). Simulation results indicate that there exists a non-trivial trade-off between the achievable sum rate and the harvested energy, and that DC bias vector dominates the amount of the harvested energy compared with the beamforming vector. Besides, for a given relatively high EH requirement, the achievable sum rate increases with the increment of the dimming level, especially for relatively small dimming level. Once the dimming level is larger than a specific value, with the increment of the dimming level, more transmit power will be allocated for illumination, resulting in the decrement of the achievable sum rate.

Joint precoding and power allocation in a FSO channel with signal-dependent noise.

To enhance the throughput of visible light communication (VLC), this paper investigates precoding and power allocation jointly in a free space optical channel with signal-dependent noise (SDN-FSO). With the presence of SDN from a light source, a more realistic multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) VLC channel model is introduced. First, based on the entropy power inequality, a capacity bound for the SDN-FSO channel is derived under a MU-MISO scenario. Second, due to the nonnegativity of SDN-FSO input, a zero forcing constraint is introduced to alleviate multi-user interference. Third, from the perspective of resource allocation, min-max and total power budget constraints are taken into consideration. A non-convex joint optimization problem is formulated and divided into two subproblems, i.e.,the precoding subproblem and power allocation subproblem. Moreover, an iterative algorithm based on a concave and convex program and a simplified high signal-to-noise ratio approximation method are iteratively implemented in the precoding subproblem. For the power allocation subproblem, successive convex approximation is employed to ensure its optimality. Simulation results indicate that the proposed joint optimization methods can converge after about two iterations and accomplish a throughput improvement of up to 1∼3n a t s/s/H z as compared with the benchmarks for four different spacing scenarios. When channel state information is interfered with noise, the proposed methods still demonstrate their superior performance with varying degrees of noise.

Distortion managed directly modulated on-off keying signal transmission for 10 Gbps visible light communications using electrical filtration

Abstract In this research, a communication system that uses visible light as a carrier and is designed for high-throughput interior applications. In order to lower the overall system cost, this work uses intensity modulation at the transmitter and direct detection with electrical filtering at the receiver. Various low-pass filtration techniques (Gaussian, Butterworth, Bessel, and Chebyshev) have been proposed in his paper to mitigate the effect of channel distortion in visible light communication (VLC) systems. The achieved transmission range is up to 3 m in addition to the supported data rate of 10 Gbps with a bit error rate of less than 10−9. Simulations are carried out using optisystem software that includes PRBS OOK optical signal generation at LED output in the transmitter, VLC channel, and APD with LPF in the receiver.

Visible Light Communications for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: Channel Modeling and Experimental Validation

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely applied for their high mobility and low cost, and the visible light communication (VLC) aided UAV can combine the flexibility of UAV and the high transmission rate of VLC. However, the VLC links of a UAV are inevitably affected by the jittering effects, which were rarely characterized. In this letter, the channel between a light emitting diode (LED) and a hovering UAV is modeled considering the random orientation error of the UAV. Closed-form expressions are derived for the probability density function (PDF) and the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the orientation error, which also leads to closed-form asymptotic PDF and CDF expressions of the UAV’s VLC channel gain. Simulation and experimental results are demonstrated to verify the theoretical derivations. The work lays a theoretical foundation for VLC-aided UAVs, providing insightful suggestions for the system design.

Performance study of visible light communication through non-orthogonal multiple access (noma) – LI-FI

Li-Fi (Light Fidelity) is a new wireless communication technology that is comparable to Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi). However, Li-Fi is supposed to be better than Wi-Fi, and this has been theoretically verified. Li-Fi is also thought to make a significant contribution to wireless networks. The practical application of Li-Fi will be discussed in this study. In this paper we chose NOMA because of its ability and efficiency in simultaneously transporting data, as well as its application in 5G cellular networks. VLC stands for visible light communication, as the name implies. In this section, we will investigate how the data transporting capabilities of Li-Fi make use of the visible light emitted by light emitting diodes (LEDs). In this paper, the effectiveness of a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) protocol used in a downlink visible light communication (VLC) system is evaluated for two distinct situations. On a two-user paired NOMA, we create an analytical expression of the system coverage probability for QoS provisioning and show that optimum power allocation coefficients do exist. Additionally, we establish the existence of optimal power allocation coefficients. Last but not least, the numerical and analytical results illustrated in our work show that the VLC single-cell system throughput obtained with our technique is better than that obtained with the earlier strategy. Additionally, it is shown that the suggested alternative lower bound fits the original NOMA-VLC GRPA objective asymptotically using indoor VLC channels.

R-AP's position-domain model for an RO-receiver and AP placement strategy for an uninterrupted link between the robotic arm and AP in the VLC network.

In the visible light communication (VLC) network, the optical link between the robotic arm and the access point (AP) is easily interrupted due to the random orientation of the receiver on the robotic arm. First, based on the VLC channel model, a position-domain model of reliable AP (R-AP) for a random-orientation receiver (RO-receiver) is proposed. The channel gain of the VLC link between the receiver and the R-AP is non-zero. The tilt-angle range of the RO-receiver is [0,π]. Given the field of view (FOV) angle and the orientation of the receiver, the R-AP's position domain of the receiver can be obtained by this model. Then, based on the R-AP's position-domain model for the RO-receiver, a novel AP placement strategy is proposed. Under this AP placement strategy, the number of R-APs for the RO-receiver is not less than 1, thereby effectively avoiding link interruption caused by the random orientation of receivers. Finally, it is proved by the Monte Carlo method that, under the AP placement strategy proposed in this paper, the VLC link of the receiver on the robotic arm can remain uninterrupted during the movement of the robotic arm.

Rate-Splitting-Based Generalized Multiple Access for Band-Limited Multi-User VLC

In this paper, we propose a rate-splitting-based generalized multiple access (GMA) scheme for band-limited multi-user visible light communication (VLC) systems. By splitting and transmitting the input data of each user in a joint orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) manner, the proposed rate-splitting-based GMA scheme can obtain better bandwidth utilization than OMA and suffer less severe interference than NOMA. In order to achieve the maximum sum rate over typical low-pass VLC channels, the optimal rate-splitting-based GMA scheme was first obtained through theoretical analysis and computer simulations. Subsequently, the superiority of the optimal rate-splitting-based GMA scheme over both OMA and NOMA under various channel conditions, user separations, and error propagation levels was further verified by the theoretical, simulation, and experimental results. In particular, the experimental results showed that, when the error propagation ratio was increased from 0 to 0.2, the sum rate reduction ratio was significantly reduced from 31.4% to 7.5% by replacing NOMA with the obtained optimal rate-splitting-based GMA.

Phase Characterization and Correction in a Hardware Implementation of an OFDM-Based System for VLC Applications

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems have been widely implemented in guided and non-guided communications. Even though they are becoming a standard for popular technologies such as WiFi, their implementation in newly emerging ones is still in evolution. As the number of connected devices increases, the radio frequency (RF) channel gets crowded. Here is where visible light communication (VLC) links gain interest. VLC offers a wireless alternative to RF with a trade-off between the necessity of line of sight with the offer of a free, highly secure, and immune to electromagnetic interference communication channel. This paper proposes a programmable software implementation of an OFDM system using a novel phase correction technique for VLC channels. The new equation considers two types of phase shifts, one that will be non-deterministic (has a random variation) and another that will be deterministic and, therefore, can be estimated and corrected. This second can be split into two: one that comes from the clock differences and has more impact on higher subcarriers, and the second that appears from the electronics of the link and will directly impact the symbols' phase. The main difference with current phase correction techniques is the identification and estimation of the deterministic noise specific to VLC systems. The deterministic noise impact all subcarriers equally and must be subtracted before the measure of the shift induced by the differences between the transmitter and receiver clocks. Another difference is that the analysis and tests have been done with data collected in an actual hardware implementation.

Hyperparameter-Free RFF Based Post-Distorter for OTFS VLC System

Visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as an eco-friendly and low-cost technology for the next-generation communication systems. However, for VLC systems, existing works report performance degradation due to light-emitting-diode (LED) non-linearity, multipath and relative mobility between the transmitter and the receiver. Additionally, multipath and user-mobility introduce inter-symbol-interference (ISI) and frequency-domain spreading which degrades the performance of VLC systems. For such scenarios, orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation is well-known to jointly addresses impairments due to multipath and user-mobility. To mitigate the distortions due to LED non-linearity, recently reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS)-based random Fourier feature (RFF) techniques have emerged which alleviate the dependence on learning a dictionary and, outperforms classical polynomial based techniques. However, performance of these techniques is sensitive to the choice of kernel-width. Thus, for the OTFS systems impaired by LED non-linearity, this manuscript proposes a hyperparameter-free RFF-based post-distorter, under finite-memory budget without the need of explicitly tuning kernel-width for best performance. Analytical bounds for the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the proposed post-distorter are presented, and validated via simulations over realistic VLC channels. From the results it is verified that the proposed receiver achieves better BER performance over uncompensated scenario and classical baseline polynomial based technique.

Channel Characteristics and Link Adaption for Visible Light Communication in an Industrial Scenario.

Visible light communication (VLC) is one of the key technologies for the sixth generation (6G) to support the connection and throughput of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Furthermore, VLC channel modeling is the foundation for designing efficient and robust VLC systems. In this paper, the ray-tracing simulation method is adopted to investigate the VLC channel in IIoT scenarios. The main contributions of this paper are divided into three aspects. Firstly, based on the simulated data, large-scale fading and multipath-related characteristics, including the channel impulse response (CIR), optical path loss (OPL), delay spread (DS), and angular spread (AS), are analyzed and modeled through the distance-dependent and statistical distribution models. The modeling results indicate that the channel characteristics under the single transmitter (TX) are proportional to the propagation distance. It is also found that the degree of time domain and spatial domain dispersion is higher than that in the typical rooms (conference room and corridor). Secondly, the density of surrounding objects and the effects of user heights on these channel characteristics are also investigated. Through the analysis, it can be observed that the denser objects can contribute to the smaller OPL and the larger RMS DS under the single TX case. Furthermore, due to the blocking effect of surrounding objects, the larger OPL and the smaller RMS DS can be observed at the receiver with a low height. Thirdly, due to the distance dependence of the channel characteristics and large time-domain dispersion, the link adaption method is further proposed to optimize the multipath interference problem. This method combines a luminary adaptive selection and delay adaption technique. Then, the performance of the link adaption method is verified from four aspects through simulation, including the signal-to-noise (SNR), the RMS DS, the CIRs, and the bit-error rate (BER) of a direct-current-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) system. The verification results indicate that our proposed method has a significant optimization for multipath interference.

CSMA/CA protocol design in hybrid network of Visible Light Communication and RF Femtocell systems

In this article, an access protocol based on the CSMA/CA algorithm and the IEEE 802.11n standard is proposed for a network composed of a hybrid Visible Light Communication (VLC) and Radio Frequency (RF) Femtocell in an indoor scenario. To evaluate the performance of the proposer protocol, a hybrid network comprised of VLC access points (APs) distributed on the ceiling, an RF AP located in the center of the room, and n users was modeled. The network considered that the VLC channel was used only for the downlink, while the RF Femtocell was used for the uplink, exchange of information with the server, and downlink. The benefits of solutions associated with hybrid Femtocells between VLC and RF that guarantee the natural use of the users are studied. The performance of the proposed protocol was studied in terms of delay, throughput, and transmission efficiency. Numerical results show that the increase in the number of users on the network leads to an exponential decrease in the average delay. In addition, it was observed that the throughput obtained by the hybrid VLC/RF Femtocell system was superior to the traditional throughput of both independent networks. The combination of VLC and RF Femtocell channels depending on the location of the users allow for increasing transmission efficiency of the hybrid VLC/RF Femtocell network.

Comparing the Performance of OFDM and OCDM-based Visible Light Communications: Numerical and Experimental Analysis

Numerical and experimental analysis of visible light communication (VLC) systems based on orthogonal chirp division multiplexing (OCDM) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are presented in this paper. Unlike most of the related publications, in this work we numerically compared OCDM and OFDM based VLC systems with the same equalization process, i.e., employing an one tap equalizer (OTE) in both systems. Simulation results in line-of-sight VLC channels show that both systems have the same performance when baseband multicarrier signals are used. The impact of the optical modulation index and the bias current of a previously characterized light-emitting diode were also evaluated. Nevertheless, the experimental demonstrations, in which bandpass signals were used due to the bandpass characteristic of the exploited setup, show that OFDM-based system outperforms the VLC links with OCDM signals, when the OTE equalizer is used in both systems. The performance of the OCDM-based system was improved by using a zero forcing frequency domain equalizer.