Spatial dimming scheme for optical OFDM based visible light communication

A new dimming control scheme termed spatial dimming orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (SD-OFDM) is proposed for multiple-input and multiple output OFDM based visible light communication. The basic idea of SD-OFDM is that the illumination can be represented by the number of glared light emitting diodes (LEDs) in an LED lamp. As the biasing level of LEDs does not adjust to represent the required illumination level, the proposed scheme can significantly mitigate the clipping noise compared to analogue dimming schemes. Furthermore, unlike digital dimming schemes that control illumination levels by setting different duty cycles of pulse width modulation, the proposed scheme is always in the "on-state" for varied illumination levels. Both analytical and simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme is an efficient and feasible dimmable scheme. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America