Advanced modulation formats for underwater visible light communications [Invited]

In this paper, we present a detailed comparison of applying three advanced modulation formats including carrierless amplitude and phase modulation(CAP), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(OFDM), and discrete Fourier transform spread orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(DFT-S OFDM) in underwater visible light communication(UVLC) systems. Cascaded post-equalization schemes are suggested to compensate the system impairments. For the first time, a two-level post-equalizer is presented to mitigate the nonlinear effect and improve the system performance of UVLC. The first post-equalization is based on a novel recursive least square Volterra. These modulation formats are all experimentally demonstrated with corresponding digital signal processing(DSP) algorithms. The experimental results show that single carrier modulations including CAP and DFT-S OFDM can outperform OFDM. Our experiment results show that up to 3 Gb/s over a 1.2 m underwater visible light transmission can be achieved by using DFT-S OFDM 64 QAM and CAP-64. The measured bit error rate is well under the hard decision-forward error correction(HD-FEC) threshold of 3.8 × 10^(-3).

Investigation on performance of special-shaped 8-quadrature amplitude modulation constellations applied in visible light communication

Light-emitting diode(LED)-based visible light communication(VLC) has become a potential candidate for nextgeneration ultra-high-speed indoor wireless communication. In this paper, four special-shaped 8-quadrature amplitude modulation(QAM) constellations are investigated in a single-carrier VLC system. It is numerically verified and experimentally demonstrated that circular(7,1) shows obvious superiority in the performance of the dynamic range of signal voltage peak-to-peak(vpp) value and bit error rate(BER). Next best is rectangular, followed by triangular; circular(4,4) has the worst performance. A data rate of 1.515 Gbit/s is successfully achieved by circular(7,1) employing a red chip LED over 0.5 m indoor free space transmission below a BER threshold of3.8 × 10^(-3). Compared with circular(4,4), the traditional 8-QAM constellation, circular(7,1) provides a wider dynamic range of signal vpp, a higher data rate, and a longer transmission distance. To the best of our knowledge,this is the first investigation into the performance differences of special-shaped 8-QAM constellations in a highspeed, single-carrier VLC system, and the results comprehensively demonstrate that circular(7,1) is the optimal option.