OFDM-Based Optical Spatial Modulation

Spatial modulation (SM) has proven to be a promising multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technique which provides high energy efficiency and reduces system complexity. In SM, only one transmitter is active at any given time while the rest of them remain silent. The index of the active transmitter carries information. This spatial information is in addition to the data carried by the constellation symbols in the signal domain. Therefore, SM increases the transmission rate of the communication system compared to single-input-single-output and space-time block coding (STBC)-MIMO. For signal domain data encoding, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been widely adopted. The key benefits in multicarrier intensity-modulation and direct-detection (IM/DD) systems are: the capability to achieve high spectral efficiency and the ability to effectively mitigate direct-current (DC) wander effects and the impact of ambient light. However, current off-the-shelf light emitting diodes (LEDs) which are used as transmit entities are primarily bandwidth limited. Thus, there are benefits of combining SM and OFDM to enhance transmission speeds while maintaining low complexity. In this paper, the two most common OFDM-based SM types, namely frequency domain SM (FD-SM) and time domain SM(TD-SM), are investigated for optical wireless communications (OWC). Moreover, proof-of-concept experimental results are presented to showcase practical feasibility of both techniques. The obtained results are also compared with Monte Carlo simulations. The results show that TD-SM with an optimal maximum-a-posteriori-probability (MAP) detector significantly outperforms FD-SM. It can be inferred from the results that TD-SM is a strong candidate among OFDM-based optical SM systems for future optical IM/DD wireless communication systems.