Performance of MIMO enhanced unipolar OFDM with realistic indoor visible light channel models

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) involves the dual use of illumination infrastructure for high speed wireless access. Designing such optical based communication systems, realistic indoor optical channel modeling becomes an important issue to be handled. In this paper, first we obtain new realistic indoor VL channel characterizations and models, in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scenario, using non-sequential ray tracing approach for the channel impulse responses (CIRs). Practical issues such as number of light emitting diode (LED) chips per luminary, spacing between LED chips, objects inside the room and cabling topology are also investigated. On the other hand, since indoor optical channels exhibit frequency selectivity, multi-carrier communication systems, particularly orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is used to handle the resulting inter-symbol interference in VLC systems. Hence, we propose a new MIMO-OFDM based VLC system, called MIMO enhanced unipolar OFDM (MIMO-eU-OFDM) by combining MIMO transmission techniques with the recently proposed eU-OFDM scheme. The bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed system is investigated in the presence of the 2 × 2 and 4 × 4 realistic MIMO VLC channels and its BER performance is compared with the reference optical MIMO-OFDM systems.