Foundational analysis of spatial optical wireless communication utilizing image sensor

Guest Editorial

This paper is an overview of indoor OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing)/DMT (discrete multitone) optical wireless (OW) communication systems. Indoor OW OFDM/DMT systems can be classified into two groups. One group produces half-wave symmetry time signal at the output of the OFDM modulator by special assignment of subcarriers. Thus, allowing signal clipping at the zero level and avoiding the need of DC bias at the expense of data rate reduction. ACOOFDM (asymmetrically clipped OFDM system) and PAM (pulse amplitude modulation)-DMT are two techniques from the first group. The second group assigns data to all possible subcarriers to increase the data rate. However, half-wave symmetry signals cannot be achieved and DC bias is needed to convert the bipolar signal to a unipolar signal before modulating the LED (light emitting diode) intensity. DC-biased OFDM and a novel technique, proposed in this paper, called orthogonal PAM-DMT (OPAM-DMT) that is an extension of the proposed PAM-DMT by using discrete sine transform and discrete cosine transform to transmit two orthogonal signals at the same time, are two techniques from the second group. This paper considerers a practical LED model and studies the performance of all these systems in terms of average electrical OFDM signal power versus bit-error-ratio (BER) in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise channel (AWGN). It is shown that LED clipping has significant impact on the performance of all these systems and the performance of these systems substantially depends on the considered modulation order.

Light emitting diode (LED) nonlinearities have a significant impact on the performance of optical wireless (OW) communication systems based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation. In this paper, different techniques to compensate for the induced nonlinearity distortions are presented and analyzed. First, single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) is proposed instead of OFDM for OW systems. In SC-FDMA, some of the major OFDM problems such as high peak-to-average power ratio are inherently resolved. It is shown that the performance of OW OFDM systems and their counterpart SC-FDMA systems are traded off for certain input signal powers and modulation orders. Second, OW OFDM systems with hard, soft, and turbo channel coding techniques are considered. It is reported that significant performance gains can be achieved through channel coding. Finally, a novel method to reduce signal clipping distortion through the use of iterative signal clipping (ISC) and multiple transmit LEDs is proposed. The ISC technique is based on iterative clipping of the time domain OFDM signal and transmission from a multiple LED transmitter. Transmit LEDs are synchronized, located close to each other, and placed to emit light in the same direction. Hence, the channel path gains from each LED to the receiver photodiode are similar. The received signals from the different LEDs add coherently at the receiver. Reported results demonstrate that the effect of distortion is eliminated or significantly reduced based on the considered number of transmit LEDs.

High-speed optical wireless communication (OWC) systems based on light-emitting diode (LED), such as Li-Fi, are promising solutions for the looming spectrum crisis in 6G wireless communications. OWCs typically extend the RF spectrum by harnessing the visible light and infrared spectra, but the recent advancements in deep-ultraviolet (DUV) LED device technology allow us to further extend the OWC spectrum down to the DUV range, namely the solar-blind band. This talk reviews the recent progress of the high-speed OWCs based on DUV-LEDs including Gbps-class transmission demonstrations in direct sunlight and analyses on the microscopic structural and optical characteristics of high-speed AlGaN-based LEDs.

The combination of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and spatial modulation (SM) can enhance the capacity of optical wireless communication (OWC) systems with low complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel SM scheme for intensity modulation/direct detection (IM/DD) OWC systems by employing discrete Hartley transform based OFDM (DHT-OFDM). Due to the use of DHT with one-dimensional constellations, the Hermitian symmetry constraint, which is generally imposed in conventional discrete Fourier transform based OFDM (DFT-OFDM) to obtain a real-valued output signal, is not required in DHT-OFDM. As a result, DHT-OFDM based SM can achieve much higher spectral efficiency than that of DFT-OFDM based SM in OWC systems. Simulation results show that, for an indoor 4×4 SM-OWC system with a spectral efficiency of 6 bits/s/Hz, DHT-OFDM achieves a remarkable 4.5-dB transmit signal-to-noise ratio reduction for an overall bit error rate of 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-3</sup> in comparison to conventional DFT-OFDM.

We report systematic investigation of the device-sizedependent performance of ultraviolet C (UV-C) light emitting diodes (LEDs) for optical wireless communication (OWC). Utilizing 273 nm-wavelength devices with diameters in the range of 40 μm to 300 μm, the size-dependent electrical, optical and frequency response characteristics of AlGaN UV-C LEDs are analyzed. As the junction area scales down, the smaller devices present lower optical power but faster modulation speed. Based on a 1-m point-to-point OWC system, this study further explores the LED size effect on the communication performance including channel gain, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), theoretical Shannon capacity, achievable data transmission rate, relevant ratio, and spectral efficiency (SE). The system employing a 60 μm diameter (micro) LED transmitter achieves the highest average SNR and SE accompanying a data transmission rate up to a 5.53 Gbps at the forward error correction floor of 3.8×10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−3</sup> . These results suggest an optimal device diameter of ∼60 μm for further development of high-performance UV-C short-range line-of-sight (LoS) OWC.

Light-emitting diode (LED)-based Optical wireless communications is capable to provide ultracheap wireless communication for many applications, especially for the indoor applications, it can be used to provide flexible wireless communication system for data communication (to connect personal computers/laptops with printers, and digital imaging devices) or creating access points in the floors the LED-based optical wireless communication has many advantages over RF communications like lower system complexity, cheaper components, simple interfacing, and security. Besides these advantages, the LED optical wireless communications face many challenges for its implementation in indoor applications because of high interference from other light sources like florescent lamps, CFL’s, which not only emits the light at same spectrum but may also use the switching frequencies (including harmonics) similar modulation frequencies. However, many solutions have been already presented to overcome these challenges. This paper provides the simple and efficient spectrum spreading approach which not only reduces the effect of interference but also enables multiuser communication without using modulating carrier. The simulation results shows that the proposed technique provides much better results than the Manchester coded systems.

This paper presents a modulation scheme in the time domain based on On-Off-Keying and proposes various compatible supports for different types of image sensors. The content of this article is a sub-proposal to the IEEE 802.15.7r1 Task Group (TG7r1) aimed at Optical Wireless Communication (OWC) using an image sensor as the receiver. The compatibility support is indispensable for Image Sensor Communications (ISC) because the rolling shutter image sensors currently available have different frame rates, shutter speeds, sampling rates, and resolutions. However, focusing on unidirectional communications (i.e., data broadcasting, beacons), an asynchronous communication prototype is also discussed in the paper. Due to the physical limitations associated with typical image sensors (including low and varying frame rates, long exposures, and low shutter speeds), the link speed performance is critically considered. Based on the practical measurement of camera response to modulated light, an operating frequency range is suggested along with the similar system architecture, decoding procedure, and algorithms. A significant feature of our novel data frame structure is that it can support both typical frame rate cameras (in the oversampling mode) as well as very low frame rate cameras (in the error detection mode for a camera whose frame rate is lower than the transmission packet rate). A high frame rate camera, i.e., no less than 20 fps, is supported in an oversampling mode in which a majority voting scheme for decoding data is applied. A low frame rate camera, i.e., when the frame rate drops to less than 20 fps at some certain time, is supported by an error detection mode in which any missing data sub-packet is detected in decoding and later corrected by external code. Numerical results and valuable analysis are also included to indicate the capability of the proposed schemes.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have been widely studied for improving throughput and robustness of optical wireless communication (OWC) systems. Indeed, with MIMO, the likelihood of simultaneous interruption of all optical beams is greatly reduced. For throughput improvement, many power loading strategies are obtained for a total power constraint while allowing power to be freely exchanged among light-emitting diodes (LEDs). In scenarios with unequal distances between LEDs and the user terminal, more power is allocated to the LED that has a better channel than to others. In practice, every optical front-end has its own power limitation and a per-LED power constraint is more meaningful than a total power constraint. This paper studies to what extent this has an impact on the performance of LED-based distributed MIMO (D-MIMO) OWC links. We formulate the achievable rate optimization problem for both cases, when the total power is constrained or when under a per-LED power constraint. Results show that, the achievable rate under a per-LED power constraint is lower than under a total power constraint, but it is higher than if the power is uniformly spread over the entire bandwidth. It also allows for transmit power saving, at a cost of higher computational complexity. In addition, under a per-LED power constraint, LEDs with better channel condition tends to use a modulation bandwidth far above the 3-dB bandwidth.

Multihop relaying is a potential technique to mitigate channel impairments in optical wireless communications (OWC). In this paper, multiple fixed-gain amplify-and-forward (AF) relays are employed to enhance the OWC performance under the combined effect of atmospheric turbulence, pointing errors, and fog. We consider a long-range OWC link by modeling the atmospheric turbulence by the Fisher-Snedecor <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathcal {F}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> distribution, pointing errors by the generalized non-zero boresight model, and random path loss due to fog. We also consider a short-range OWC system by ignoring the impact of atmospheric turbulence. We derive novel upper bounds on the probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for both short and long-range multihop OWC systems by developing exact statistical results for a single-hop OWC system under the combined effect of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathcal {F}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> -turbulence channels, non-zero boresight pointing errors, and fog-induced fading. Based on these expressions, we present analytical expressions of outage probability (OP) and average bit-error-rate (ABER) performance for the considered OWC systems involving single-variate Fox's H and Meijer's G functions. Moreover, asymptotic expressions of the outage probability in high SNR region are developed using simpler Gamma functions to provide insights on the effect of channel and system parameters. The derived analytical expressions are validated through Monte-Carlo simulations, and the scaling of the OWC performance with the number of relay nodes is demonstrated with a comparison to the single-hop transmission.

High-speed wireless communications in personal areas are now highly demanded, given that broadband connectivity has now reached the doorstep of the users' premises. Optical wireless technology has been considered as a promising solution due to the availability of huge unregulated bandwidth. However, the coverage area of optical wireless communication systems is limited because of safety issues and localization of users is needed. Previously, we proposed a localization system for personal areas based on optical wireless technology, so the same system was used for both localization and high-speed wireless communications. However, the height difference between the fiber transceiver and subscriber was fixed in the investigation. In real applications, the height of subscriber unit is always changing and the localization system should have the capability of estimating the height difference. In this paper, we propose a novel optical wireless based localization system for personal areas with the capability of height estimation. The localization and height estimation functions are realized by the combinational usage of received signal power and angle of arrival information. Experimental results show that a localization accuracy of ∼ 4.73 cm can be achieved and the height estimation accuracy is ∼ 4.86 cm. When this localization system with height estimation is incorporated with the previously proposed optical wireless communication system, high-speed wireless connectivity can be provided in personal areas.

Optical wireless communication is one of the emerging technologies. Over the last few years it has been the growing interests which have some indoor and outdoor applications. The demand for wireless communication has been growing day-by-day. With radio spectrum, there are some problems related to congestion, limitations on bandwidth as the number of users are increasing day-by-day. As a result, optical wireless communication systems are been used which provides high data rates, much higher bandwidth, unregulated spectrum and highly secured networks. In this paper a review is done on optical wireless communication. Various fields and applications are discussed like under water, space, aircrafts, light fidelity (Li-Fi), etc. Different light sources, coding schemes, modulation techniques are discussed. Also some of the challenges are discussed here.

Recently, we proposed a novel transmission scheme termed decomposed-quadrature optical single carrier frequency domain equalization (DQO-SCFDE) suitable for intensity-modulated direct-detection (IM/DD) diffuse optical wireless (DOW) communication. DQO-SCFDE has been shown to perform better than the conventional asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) when the non-linearity characteristics of the light emitting diodes (LED) are considered. In this paper we present a detail comparison of DQO-SCFDE and ACO-OFDM. We then propose a space-time coding scheme for DQO-SCFDE using two LED's at the transmitter to improve the bit-error rate performance.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a full-duplex integrated passive optical network (PON) and indoor optical wireless communication (OWC) system. For the PON part, an external cavity laser (ECL) and a directly modulated laser (DML) are used as optical sources for downlink and uplink, respectively. The OWC subsystem utilizes a visible light-emitting diode (LED) for downlink and an infrared LED (IR-LED) for uplink transmission. To enable high spectral efficiency (SE), high-speed transmission, and flexible multiple access with simplified optical network unit (ONU)-side digital signal processing (DSP), multilevel, multiband quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and hybrid 128/64/16 Nyquist single-carrier frequency domain equalization (N-SC-FDE) modulation are implemented in this paper. In terms of 62.5 MHz OWC N-SC-FDE signals, the system successfully delivered a further 140 cm indoor distance after transmitting over a span of 25 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) together with three subbands of 250 MHz PON signals. As a proof of concept, an integrated system of symmetrical full-duplex 5 Gb/s PON and 250 Mb/s OWC at each direction for three wired users and one wireless user is successfully achieved. The measured bit error ratios (BERs) for each user are all smaller than the 7% pre-forward-error-correction (pre-FEC) limit of 3.8 × 10−3, which shows the promising potential and feasibility of this proposal to extend multiple services from metro areas to suburban areas.

With the escalation of heterogeneous data traffic, the research on optical wireless communication (OWC) has attracted much attention, owing to its advantages such as wide spectrum, low power consumption and high security. Ubiquitous optical devices, e.g. light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and cameras, are employed to support optical wireless links. Since the distribution of these optical devices is usually dense, multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) can be naturally adopted to attain spatial diversity gain or spatial multiplexing gain. As the scale of OWC networks enlarges, optical MIMO can also collaborate with network-level operations, like user/AP grouping, to enhance the network throughput. Since OWC is preferred for short-range communications and is sensitive to the directions/rotations of transceivers, optical MIMO links vary frequently and sharply in outdoor scenarios when considering the mobility of optical devices, raising new challenges to network design. In this work, we present an overview of optical MIMO techniques, as well as the cooperation of MIMO and user/AP grouping in OWC networks. In consideration of the challenges for outdoor OWC, key technologies are then proposed to facilitate the adoption of optical MIMO in outdoor scenarios, especially in vehicular ad hoc networks. Lastly, future applications of MIMO in OWC networks are discussed. This article is part of the theme issue 'Optical wireless communication'.