Generalized LED index modulation optical OFDM for MIMO visible light communications systems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a generalized light emitting diode (LED) index modulation scheme for multiple input multiple output-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) visible light communications (VLC) systems. The proposed scheme generalizes the LED index modulation concept by using the spatial multiplexing principle to transmit complex OFDM signals through VLC channels by separating these signals into their real-imaginary and positive-negative parts. The maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator of the proposed scheme, which relies on quadratic programing (QP) problem, is presented for flat VLC channels. It is shown via computer simulations that the proposed scheme achieves considerably better error performance than the existing VLC-MIMO-OFDM systems due to its power efficiency and improved transceiver structure.