Optical wireless communication systems

Abstract

In recent years, Optical Wireless (OW) communication techniques have attracted substantial attention as a benefit of their abundant spectral resources in the optical domain, which is a potential solution for satisfying the ever-increasing demand for increased wireless capacity in the conventional Radio Frequency (RF) band. Motivated by the emerging techniques and applications of OW communication, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) had released the IEEE standard 802.15.7 for short-range optical wireless communications, which categorised the Physical layer (PHY) of the OW communication into three candidate-solutions according to their advantages in different applications and environments: 1) Physical-layer I (PHY I): Free Space Optical (FSO)communication employs high-intensity Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) or Laser Diodes (LDs) as its transmitter. 2) Physical-layer II (PHY II) uses cost-effective, low-power directional white LEDs for the dual function of illumination and communication. 3) Physical III (PHY-III) relies on the so-called Colour-Shift Keying (CSK) modulation scheme for supporting high-rate communication.

Our investigations can be classified into three major categories, namely Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) techniques for FSO communications in the context of PHY I, video streaming in PHY-II and the analysis and design of CSK for PHY-III. To be more explicit, in Chapter 2 we first construct a novel ACO-OFDM based MIMO system and investigate its performance under various FSO turbulence channel conditions. However, MIMO systems require multiple optical chains, hence their power consumption and hardware costs become substantial. Hence, we introduced the concept of Aperture Selection (ApS) to mitigate these problems with the aid of a simple yet efficient ApS algorithm for assisting our ACO-OFDM based MIMO system.

Since the channel conditions of indoor Visible Light Communication (VLC) environments are more benign than the FSO-channels of Chapter 2, directional white LEDs are used to create an “attocell” in Chapter 3. More specifically, we investigate video streaming in a multi-Mobile Terminals (MTs) indoor VLC system relying on Unity Frequency Reuse (UFR) as well as on Higher Frequency Reuse Factor based Transmission (HFRFT) and on Vectored Transmission (VT) schemes. We minimise the distortion of video streaming, while satisfying the rate constraints as well as optical constraints of all the MTs.

In Chapter 4 we analyse the performance of CSK relying both on joint Maximum Likelihood (ML) Hard-Detection (HD), as well as on the Maximum A posteriori (MAP) criterion-based Soft-Detection (SD) of CSK. Finally, we conceive both two- stage and three-stage concatenated iterative receivers capable of achieving a substantial iteration gain, leading to a vanishingly low BER.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Lajos Hanzo: orcid.org/0000-0002-2636-5214

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