Indoor MIMO optical wireless communication using spatial modulation

In this paper, a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique for indoor optical wireless (OW) communication is proposed. The technique is referred to as optical spatial modulation (OSM). The key concept is based on spatial modulation (SM). At any given time instant, only one transmitter is active and the others are inactive. A transmitter in space is considered as a spatial constellation point which is assigned a unique bit sequence. Consequently, transmitters are turned on and off depending on the incoming data bits, similar to the activation of constellation points in traditional digital modulation schemes. Hence, a data rate of the base two logarithm of the number of transmit units is achieved. The active transmitter radiates a certain intensity level at a particular time instant. At the receiver side, the optimal SM detector is slightly modified and used to estimate the spatial constellation point. The estimated spatial constellation point is used to arrive at the original bit stream via de-mapping. The upper bound bit-error-ratio (BER) of OSM is analyzed for a MIMO configuration consisting of four transmit units (light emitting diodes (LEDs)) and four receive units (photo diodes (PDs)) in a room. The BER performance is determined for different transmitter and receiver separation distances and different transmitter half power semiangles (φ1/2). It is shown that the proposed OSM technique achieves twice and four times the data rate as compared to OOK (on-off keying) and PPM (pulse-position modulation), respectively.