Visible Light Communication Techniques and Receiver Design

Abstract

The increasing demand on high-speed data transmissions and the ever-increasing number of users and smart machines that transmit and receive various amounts of data puts an increasing pressure on the existing communication networks. Massive capacity and ubiquitous connectivity are the main challenges for future networks. The medium of radio frequency is fast-approaching what is called a 'spectrum crunch' and, thus, there is a pressing need to have access to more spectrum or use the existing spectrum more efficiently. Fortunately, visible light communication (VLC) offers a wide bandwidth of unregulated and unlicensed spectrum that promises to sustain the growing needs for capacity and connectivity. VLC inherently provides security and spatial frequency reuse capability through the use of visible light waveforms generated from light emitting diodes. The contributions of this thesis are as follows: (a) a survey in which we study the structure, advantages and shortcomings of multiple access techniques in the context of VLC. We put emphasis on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based techniques and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) (b) a novel receiver design based on a multistage single carrier frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) with minimum mean square error (MMSE) decoders. This design incorporates linear processing techniques to exploit multipath diversity in a VLC setting.

Date of Award	Jun 2016
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Sami Muhaidat (Supervisor)