Visible Light Communication (VLC)

Visible light communication (VLC) using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or laser diodes (LDs) has been envisioned as one of the key enabling technologies for 6G and Internet of Things (IoT) systems, owing to its appealing advantages, including abundant and unregulated spectrum resources, no electromagnetic interference (EMI) radiation and high security. However, despite its many advantages, VLC faces several technical challenges, such as the limited bandwidth and severe nonlinearity of opto-electronic devices, link blockage and user mobility. Therefore, significant efforts are needed from the global VLC community to develop VLC technology further. This Special Issue, “Visible Light Communication (VLC)”, provides an opportunity for global researchers to share their new ideas and cutting-edge techniques to address the above-mentioned challenges. The 16 papers published in this Special Issue represent the fascinating progress of VLC in various contexts, including general indoor and underwater scenarios, and the emerging application of machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) techniques in VLC

OFDM-PWM scheme for visible light communications

In this paper, we propose an improved hybrid optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (O-OFDM) and pulse-width modulation (PWM) scheme for visible light communications. In this scheme, a bipolar O-OFDM signal is converted into a PWM format where the leading and trailing edges convey the frame synchronization and modulated information, respectively. The proposed scheme is insensitive to the non-linearity of the light emitting diode (LED) as LEDs are switched ‘on’ and ‘off’ between two points. Therefore, the tight requirement on the high peak-to-average-power-ratio (PAPR) in O-OFDM is no longer a major issue. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme offers an improved bit error rate performance compared to the traditional asymmetrically clipped O-OFDM (ACO-OFDM)

Application of Expurgated PPM to Indoor Visible Light Communications - Part I: Single-User Systems

Visible light communications (VLC) in indoor environments suffer from the limited bandwidth of LEDs as well as from the inter-symbol interference (ISI) imposed by multipath. In this work, transmission schemes to improve the performance of indoor optical wireless communication (OWC) systems are introduced. Expurgated pulse-position modulation (EPPM) is proposed for this application since it can provide a wide range of peak to average power ratios (PAPR) needed for dimming of the indoor illumination. A correlation decoder used at the receiver is shown to be optimal for indoor VLC systems, which are shot noise and background-light limited. Interleaving applied on EPPM in order to decrease the ISI effect in dispersive VLC channels can significantly decrease the error probability. The proposed interleaving technique makes EPPM a better modulation option compared to PPM for VLC systems or any other dispersive OWC system. An overlapped EPPM pulse technique is proposed to increase the transmission rate when bandwidth-limited white LEDs are used as sources.Comment: Journal of Lightwave Technolog

Dimming control in visible light communication using RPO-OFDM and concatenated RS-CC

Increasing wireless data traffic is creating pressure on the conventional dwindling radio frequency spectrum. A new and reliable communication medium becomes a necessity. Visible Light Communication (VLC), a subset of optical wireless communication uses the visible light spectrum between 400 and 800 THz as a medium for communication. VLC utilizes the illumination of LED to establish a communication medium. The research focused on achieving a successful VLC communication link at low intensities of light without affecting the speed, accuracy and efficiency of VLC. The achievement of the paper was to devise a method to reduce the LED brightness, reducing energy consumption and most importantly maintain a reliable, efficient and successful VLC communication link at low intensities of LED. The research comprises of a Reverse Polarity Optical-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (RPO-OFDM) modulator, a Forward Error Correction (FEC) encoder block that uses concatenated Reed Solomon - Convolutional Coding, a digital PWM dimming control circuit, an RPO-OFDM demodulator and a FEC decoder. The decoding is performed using the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm and the Viterbi algorithm. Extensive research on various modulation schemes, coding and error correction techniques along with various driver circuit design for dimming control in VLC were thoroughly investigated to conclude the best reliable solution for dimming control in VLC

Joint Dimming Control and Optimal Power Allocation for THO-OFDM Visible Light Communications

Layered or hybrid optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been proposed for use in optical communications due to its excellent spectral and power efficiencies, especially in visible light communications (VLC). However, most of the current works concentrate on transmitter and receiver design as well as the quality of service in communication networks. In this paper, we propose a spectrum-efficient dimmable triple-layer hybrid optical OFDM (DTH-OFDM) scheme to tackle the illumination requirements, considering different practical indoor VLC scenarios from low illumination to high illumination intensities. In the proposed DTH-OFDM scheme, the required dimming level is achieved by jointly adjusting the dimming factors and direct current bias. We investigate the comprehensive performance analysis of the proposed DTH-OFDM in detail, including probability density function, bit error rate (BER), spectral and energy efficiencies. In addition, a joint dimming control and optimal power allocation problem for DTH-OFDM is formulated and solved using convex optimization under the constraints of light emitting diode (LED) nonlinearity, dimming target and communications reliability. Numerical results show that, the proposed DTH-OFDM can offer continuous and arbitrary dimming target with higher spectral efficiency and lower BER compared with its counterparts, as well as an enhanced tolerance to the LED nonlinearity

The Novel PAPR Reduction Schemes for O‐OFDM‐Based Visible Light Communications

In this chapter, we propose two novel peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction schemes for the asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM) scheme used in the visible light communications (VLC) system. In the first scheme, we implement the Toeplitz matrix based Gaussian blur method to reduce the high PAPR of ACO-OFDM at the transmitter and use the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm to recover the original ACO-OFDM frame at the receiver. Simulation results show that for the 256-subcarrier ACO-OFDM system a ~6 dB improvement in PAPR is achieved compared with the original ACO-OFDM in terms of the complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF), while maintaining a competitive bit-error rate performance compared with the ideal ACO-OFDM lower bound. In the second scheme, we propose an improved hybrid optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (O-OFDM) and pulse-width modulation (PWM) scheme to reduce the PAPR for ACO-OFDM. The bipolar O-OFDM signal without negative clipping is converted into a PWM format where the leading and trailing edges carry the frame synchronization and modulated information, respectively. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed OFDM-PWM scheme offers a significant PAPR reduction compared to the ACO-OFDM with an improved bit error rate

A novel OFDM format and a machine learning based dimming control for lifi

This paper proposes a new hybrid orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) form termed as DC‐biased pulse amplitude modulated optical OFDM (DPO‐OFDM) by combining the ideas of the existing DC‐biased optical OFDM (DCO‐OFDM) and pulse amplitude modulated discrete multitone (PAM‐DMT). The analysis indicates that the required DC‐bias for DPO‐OFDM-based light fidelity (LiFi) depends on the dimming level and the components of the DPO‐OFDM. The bit error rate (BER) performance and dimming flexibility of the DPO‐OFDM and existing OFDM schemes are evaluated using MATLAB tools. The results show that the proposed DPO‐OFDM is power efficient and has a wide dimming range. Furthermore, a switching algorithm is introduced for LiFi, where the individual components of the hybrid OFDM are switched according to a target dimming level. Next, machine learning algorithms are used for the first time to find the appropriate proportions of the hybrid OFDM components. It is shown that polynomial regression of degree 4 can reliably predict the constellation size of the DCO‐OFDM component of DPO‐OFDM for a given constellation size of PAM‐DMT. With the component switching and the machine learning algorithms, DPO‐OFDM‐based LiFi is power efficient at a wide dimming range. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Spectrum and energy efficient digital modulation techniques for practical visible light communication systems

The growth in mobile data traffic is rapidly increasing in an unsustainable direction given the radio frequency (RF) spectrum limits. Visible light communication (VLC) offers a lucrative solution based on an alternative license-free frequency band that is safe to use and inexpensive to utilize. Improving the spectral and energy efficiency of intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) systems is still an on-going challenge in VLC. The energy efficiency of inherently unipolar modulation techniques such as pulse-amplitude modulation discrete multitone modulation (PAM-DMT) and asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM) degrades at high spectral efficiency. Two novel superposition modulation techniques are proposed in this thesis based on PAM-DMT and ACO-OFDM. In addition, a practical solution based on the computationally efficient augmented spectral efficiency discrete multi-tone (ASE-DMT) is proposed. The system performance of the proposed superposition modulation techniques offers significant electrical and optical power savings with up to 8 dB in the electrical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) when compared with DC-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM). The theoretical bit error ratio (BER) performance bounds for all of the proposed modulation techniques are in agreement with the Monte-Carlo simulation results. The proposed superposition modulation techniques are promising candidates for spectrum and energy efficient IM/DD systems. Two experimental studies are presented for a VLC system based on DCO-OFDM with adaptive bit and energy loading. Micrometer-sized Gallium Nitride light emitting diode (m-LED) and light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation diode (LD) are used in these studies due to their high modulation bandwidth. Record data rates are achieved with a BER below the forward error correction (FEC) threshold at 7.91 Gb/s using the violet m-LED and at 15 Gb/s using the blue LD. These results highlight the potential of VLC systems in practical high speed communication solutions. An additional experimental study is demonstrated for the proposed superposition modulation techniques based on ASE-DMT. The experimentally achieved results confirm the theoretical and simulation based performance predictions of ASE-DMT. A significant gain of up to 17.33 dB in SNR is demonstrated at a low direct current (DC) bias. Finally, the perception that VLC systems cannot work under the presence of sunlight is addressed in this thesis. A complete framework is presented to evaluate the performance of VLC systems in the presence of solar irradiance at any given location and time. The effect of sunlight is investigated in terms of the degradations in SNR, data rate and BER. A reliable high speed communication system is achieved under the sunlight effect. An optical bandpass blue filter is shown to compensate for half of the reduced data rate in the presence of sunlight. This thesis demonstrates data rates above 1 Gb/s for a practical VLC link under strong solar illuminance measured at 50350 lux in clear weather conditions