Generalization of Space-Time Block Coded-Spatial Modulation for High Data Rate VLC Systems (Invited Paper)

Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising solution to the current congestion in radio frequency (RF) spectrum. It achieves that by exploiting the huge unregulated visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum in order to enable high-speed short range wireless communications, as well as, providing an sufficient lighting. This new solution is envisioned to provide a considerably wider bandwidth that can accommodate ubiquitous broadband connectivity to indoor users and further offload data traffic from overloaded cellular networks. However, VLC suffers from several limitations, such as the limited modulation bandwidth of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that degrades the overall system spectral efficiency. In this respect, several interesting solutions have been proposed in the recent literature to overcome this limitation, such as the implementation of efficient optical modulation and multipleinput-multiple-output (MIMO) schemes. In this paper, we investigate the performance of multiple active spatial modulation (MASM) integrated with orthogonal space time block codes (STBC) for indoor VLC systems. Additionally, in ordered to reduce the receiver complexity, a simplified version of the joint maximum likelihood (ML) detector is proposed which has a linear complexity with respect to the number of transmit LEDs and the constellation size. Extensive computer simulations demonstrate that STBC-MASM improves the overall system performance compared to MASM with a considerably simplified detection. acceptedVersion