Ultra-high speed optical wireless communications with gallium-nitride microLED

This paper presents the design of a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) optical wireless communication (OWC) system based on vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) arrays. The objective is to realize data rates in excess of 1 Tb/s for the backhaul of next generation indoor networks. The proposed design combines direct current optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) with spatial multiplexing to attain the target data rate subject to eye safety limitations. Following a bottom-up approach, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise (SINR) per channel is modeled using a Gaussian emission profile for laser beams by taking into account crosstalk in the MIMO channel. According to the SINR expression, the aggregate data rate is derived. The performance of the system is studied using computer simulations, and insightful remarks are provided on the configuration of various system parameters including the beam waist, the MIMO size and array dimensions.

In this paper, a low cost optical wireless communications link with a data rate of 74 Mb/s at a bit-error ratio of $3.3 \times 10^{-3}$ is demonstrated. The components are all low cost, off-the-shelf parts, including the laser transmitter and silicon solar panel receiver. This performance is achieved by extending the usable bandwidth using analog equalization and digital techniques such as adaptive bit and power loading. Also, the performance of two spectrally efficient modulation schemes, namely direct-current biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) and pulse amplitude modulation discrete multitone (PAM-DMT) is evaluated and compared. It is shown that DCO-OFDM outperforms PAMDMT because of efficient bandwidth usage with adaptive bit loading and pre-distortion introduced by adaptive power loading. Furthermore, it is shown that PAM-DMT can avoid complex system designs and still achieve comparable data rates to that of OFDM with higher link reliability.

Recently, a novel direct current-biased optical filter bank multi-carrier (DCO-FBMC) scheme has been proposed for optical wireless communication (OWC) in intensity modulation and direct detection channel. Although the DCO-FBMC scheme supports fully asynchronized multi-user uplink transmission and has been proven to have higher spectral and power efficiency than direct current biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM), its achievable data rates, the fundamental performance metric from information theory perspective, has not been fully unveiled. In this paper, we study the uplink achievable rate and region of the DCO-FBMC system for OWC. Because of the low cost implementation of the realistic OWC system, we consider using low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) instead of full-resolution ADCs at the receiver, and study its impact on the achievable rate of the DCO-FBMC system. Simulation results indicate that although using low-resolution ADCs causes loss of system achievable rate, the performance of the 4-bit quantized DCO-FBMC system is very close to that of the full-resolution DCO-FBMC system. In addition, compared with DCO-OFBM, the maximum achievable rate of each user in DCO-FBMC system is larger. Moreover, the DCO-FBMC system with 4-bit quantization gets larger achievable rate region than the full-resolution DCO-OFDM system, especially in the case of oversampling. Therefore, our paper show that from the achievable rate perspective, using the DCO-FBMC system with low-resolution ADCs is a good candidate for optical wireless communication.

This paper introduces a novel dimming method for Light Fidelity (LiFi) based on a time-domain sample index modulation (TIM), called indexed dimming (iDim). The aim is to provide a wide brightness range, while maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance and a high transmission rate. Direct current optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) is used and novel line codes are presented. The system performance is experimentally validated by an implementation on a NI PXIe-1085 and NI-7966R Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Implementation results show that the proposed iDim jointly offers multiple benefits compared to existing dimming methods such as amplitude modulation (AM) dimming. Specially, the lowest optical power of the iDim method is measured at <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$20~\mu \text{W}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , which is 10 times lower than the measured limit of AM dimming. The iDim system provides a SNR of 22.5 dB for all brightness levels, while the AM-dimming method dramatically reduces its SNR when light is dimmed. The transmission rate of iDim is also higher than DCO-OFDM. This results in up to 40% reduced optical power per bit when compared to sDim, a pulse-width-modulation (PWM)-inspired dimming method. Therefore, iDim is a promising dimming method for applications targeting extremely low illumination levels.

In this paper, the electrical power requirement and spectral efficiency of multi-carrier transmission schemes for optical wireless communications (OWC) are compared in the presence of front-end-induced double-sided signal clipping. The two existing multi-carrier modulation techniques based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), direct-current-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) and asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM), are studied. The clipping noise can be modeled according to the Bussgang theorem and the central limit theorem (CLT) as attenuation of the data-carrying subcarriers and addition of zero-mean complex-valued Gaussian noise. Presented closed-form expressions for the attenuation factor and the clipping noise variance are employed in the derivation of the effective electrical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Using multi-level quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM), the electrical power requirement of optical OFDM (O-OFDM) transmission is obtained from the bit-error ratio (BER) system performance. It is shown that in a practical front-end biasing setup DCO-OFDM has a lower electrical power requirement to achieve a target BER as compared to ACO-OFDM for modulation orders with equal spectral efficiencies above 1 bit/s/Hz.

The quasi-static nature of the optical wireless channel means that the channel state information (CSI) can be readily available at the transmitter and receiver prior to data transmission. This implies that electrically band-limited optical wireless communication (OWC) systems can make use of optimal channel partitioning or vector coding based multi-channel modulation (MCM) to achieve high throughput by mitigating the non-linearities arising from the optical and electrical channel. This paper proposes a pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) based DC-biased optical vector coding (DCO-VC) MCM scheme for OWC. The throughput performance of DCO-VC is evaluated and compared to the well known DC-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) over hybrid (line-of-sight and diffuse) and diffuse (non line-of-sight only) visible light communication (VLC) channels with additive white Gaussian noise. For the completeness of the VLC physical layer, the performance comparison is based on an uncoded and a forward error correction transmission mode using well-known convolutional codes with Viterbi decoder. The results show that the coded DCO-VC outperforms DCO-OFDM system by achieving up to 2 and 3 dB signal to noise ratio gains over hybrid and diffuse VLC channels, respectively.

In this letter, a low-complexity receiver (Rx) is proposed for hybrid asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (HACO-OFDM). Owing to the special time-domain property of HACO-OFDM, overlaid asymmetrically clipped OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and pulse-amplitude-modulated discrete multitoned (PAM-DMT) signals can be distinguished in the time domain to reduce its computational complexity. Besides, the near-optimal optical power allocation is further applied to optimize the proposed system performance. Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that, the proposed Rx can achieve nearly the same bit error rate (BER) performance as the BER-optimal iterative Rx but with an effective complexity reduction, thus demonstrating its application potential in high-speed optical communication systems.

Guest Editorial

The demand for sixth-generation (6G) and future communication systems is pushing current wireless technologies, including the promising optical wireless communication (OWC), to their physical limits. For fundamental engineering breakthroughs, vectorial light rooted in optical physics provides a potential solution to OWC. The understanding of the physical essence of vectorial light and its use as a robust information carrier in disordered media touches upon the basic physical problem of seeking orders in disorders, thereby closely linking the future of OWC with advances in optical physics. Specifically, vectorial light fields, with different spatial modes loaded onto orthogonal polarizations, intrinsically multiplexes multiple degrees of freedom (DoFs) and enables a level of DoF control unattainable by traditional scalar modulation schemes, such as intensity modulation (IM) or homogeneous polarization modulation (PM). Furthermore, its inherent DoF coupling effect inspires novel vectorial modulation (VM) schemes, offering the possibility of a super-diversity gain. This opens up a development prospect for OWC and makes it different from conventional wireless technologies. To clarify this prospect, this article provides a systematic perspective rooted in optical physics, explaining how advances in this field are driving the evolution of scalar OWC into a vectorial era. Accordingly, we highlight the major challenges, opportunities, and preliminary solutions within this research trend. We further explore the new visions that vectorial OWC (VOWC) brings to the wireless community. For example, the multi-functional integration of optical communication, sensing, and imaging, driven by optical physics, is expected to upgrade the integrated sensing and communications functionality in 6G. Moreover, the systematic introduction of tools from cohomology theory and topological physics provides OWC with a physical perspective. We emphasize that by bridging optical physics and communication engineering, VOWC promises to greatly expand the technological vision and theoretical scope for 6G and beyond.

The energy efficiency of pulse-amplitude-modulated discrete multitone modulation (PAM-DMT) decreases as the modulation order of M-PAM modulation increases. Enhanced PAM-DMT (ePAM-DMT) was proposed as a solution to the reduced energy efficiency of PAM-DMT. This was achieved by allowing multiple streams of PAM-DMT to be superimposed and successively demodulated at the receiver side. In order to maintain a distortion-free unipolar ePAM-DMT system, the multiple time-domain PAM-DMT streams are required to be aligned. However, aligning the antisymmetry in ePAM-DMT is complex and results in efficiency losses. In this paper, a novel simplified method to apply the superposition modulation on M-PAM modulated discrete multitone (DMT) is introduced. Contrary to ePAM-DMT, the signal generation of the proposed system, termed augmented spectral efficiency discrete multitone (ASE-DMT), occurs in the frequency domain. This results in an improved spectral and energy efficiency. The analytical bit error rate (BER) performance bound of the proposed system is derived and compared with Monte-Carlo simulations. The system performance is shown to offer significant electrical and optical energy savings compared with ePAM-DMT and DC-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM).

This thesis presents two original ontributions on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The first is a thorough investigation of the error performance and channel capacity of asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM). ACO-OFDM is a modulation scheme designed specifically for optical communications. The second concerns the use of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) OFDM in radio frequency (RF) systems. A new scheme which uses polynomial cancellation coding (PCC) OFDM with time offsets is proposed. This new scheme is robust to both carrier frequency offset (CFO) and channel estimation errors. OFDM has been used extensively to reduce the effect of dispersion in wired and wireless RF systems. Although dispersion is also a problem in optical wireless systems, OFDM has not until recently been considered for use in these. This is because optical wireless systems use intensity modulation (IM) and so the transmitted signals must be nonnegative and as a result conventional OFDM signals which are bipolar cannot be used directly. ACO-OFDM and DC biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) are two non-negative forms of OFDM developed for optical systems. Both are robust to ISI but ACO-OFDM is in most cases much more power efficient. In this thesis results are presented for the performance of ACO-OFDM, DCO-OFDM and conventional optical modulation schemes such as on-off keying (OOK) and pulse position modulation (PPM) for both dispersive and non-dispersive channels. These show that ACO-OFDM is more tolerant to dispersion and requires less optical power than the other modulation schemes. To investigate the theoretical limits of an ACO-OFDM system, closed form analytical expressions for the channel capacity of ACO-OFDM are derived both for a flat channel and for representative dispersive optical wireless channels. The capacity of ACO-OFDM cannot be compared with the general case of an intensity modulated signal, because no general solution for this has yet been found. Instead the mutual information of an ACO-OFDM signal is calculated and compared with two other signal distributions: an exponential distribution and a clipped-Gaussian distribution. The combination of OFDM and MIMO has been used in several radio standards. However, MIMO OFDM systems like single-input single-output (SISO) OFDM systems are very sensitive to CFO. An improved MIMO PCC OFDM system is proposed in this thesis. In this system, the signals transmitted from different antennae have different time offsets. At the receiver, OFDM symbols are demodulated by using each of these time offsets in a matched detection window. This system shows better performance than a MIMO PCC OFDM system without time offsets in two cases: when there are channel estimation errors and in MIMO systems with more transmit antennae than receive antennae.

Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising and viable optical wireless communication (OWC) system that utilizes light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to achieve high data rates, energy efficiency, and resistance to electromagnetic interference (EMI). Direct-current biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) is a widely used scheme in VLC due to its high spectral efficiency. However, it suffers from significant challenges related to its elevated peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which causes nonlinear distortion and signal clipping due to LED limitations. To address this issue, this paper proposes a combination of Vandermonde-like matrix (VLM) precoding and nonlinear companding transform (NCT) techniques (specifically A-law and μ-law) over DCO-OFDM-based VLC. The VLM precoding minimizes the autocorrelation of the OFDM signal, hence reducing its PAPR, and NCT compresses the dynamic range of the signal. Simulation results indicated that the hybrid techniques achieved a PAPR reduction of around 3.5 dB (by 76 %); this is in the best case reduction compared to the conventional DCO-OFDM while maintaining an acceptable bit error rate (BER), moderately higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is required.

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.

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'.

Free space, dynamic, optical wireless communications will require topology control for optimization of network performance. Such networks may need to be configured for bi- or multiple-connectedness, reliability and quality-of-service. Topology control involves the introduction of new links and/or nodes into the network to achieve such performance objectives through autonomous reconfiguration as well as precise pointing, acquisition, tracking, and steering of laser beams. Reconfiguration may be required because of link degradation resulting from obscuration or node loss. As a result, the optical transceivers may need to be re-directed to new or existing nodes within the network and tracked on moving nodes. The redirection of transceivers may require operation over a whole sphere, so that small-angle beam steering techniques cannot be applied. In this context, we are studying the performance of optical wireless links using lightweight, bi-static transceivers mounted on high-performance stepping motor driven stages. These motors provide an angular resolution of 0.00072 degree at up to 80,000 steps per second. This paper focuses on the performance characteristics of these agile transceivers for pointing, acquisition, and tracking (PAT), including the influence of acceleration/deceleration time, motor angular speed, and angular re-adjustment, on latency and packet loss in small free space optical (FSO) wireless test networks.