Detection and performance analysis for MIMO visible light communication system using joint optical spatial and pulse amplitude width modulation

Conventional optical spatial modulation (SM) scheme activates one of the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to transmit an intensity-modulated optical signal, in which the index of the activated LED is determined by spatial symbol and the emitted intensity is controlled by temporal symbol. In order to enhance the spectral efficiency (bits per channel use), we propose a joint SM and pulse amplitude width modulation (PAWM) as a novel optical spatial–temporal signaling scheme. In this paper, the proposed SM-PAWM optical signaling scheme is applied in a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) visible light communication (VLC) system. Employing optimal maximum likelihood (ML) algorithm to extract the spatial and temporal symbols is computationally prohibitive; hence, we develop a novel low-complexity detection scheme that converts the joint optimization problem separately to decode the spatial and temporal symbols. Moreover, theoretical results in terms of the successful identification probability of activated LED as well as the overall symbol error rate are derived. Extensive computer simulations are performed to validate the analytical results. It is shown that the proposed detection scheme is a feasible alternative to the ML detector in the VLC-MIMO system employing SM-PAWM.