Optical Asymmetric Modulation for VLC Systems - Invited Paper

The explosive growth of connected devices and the increasing number of broadband users have led to an unprecedented growth in traffic demand. To this effect, the next generation wireless systems are envisioned to meet this growth and offer a potential data rate of 10 Gbps or more. In this context, an attractive solution to the current spectrum crunch issue is to exploit the visible light spectrum for the realization of high-speed commutation systems. However, this requires solutions to certain challenges relating to visible light communications (VLC), such as the stringent requirements of VLC-based intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD), which require signals to be real and unipolar. The present work proposes a novel power-domain multiplexing based optical asymmetric modulation (OAM) scheme for indoor VLC systems, which is particularly adapted to transmit high-order modulation signals using linear real and unipolar constellations that fit into the restrictions of IM/DD systems. It is shown that the proposed scheme provides improved system performance that outperforms alternative modulation schemes, at no extra complexity.