Multiuser Transmit Precoding Design for Dimming Compatible Visible Light Communications

In multiuser visible light communication (VLC) systems, many transmit precoding (TPC) techniques have been investigated to suppress multiuser interference. However, these conventional works restrict their modulation to the special case of zero mean, which inherently limits their application to some popular modulations associated with the non-zero mean in VLC, such as pulse position modulation (PPM). Since the modulation with non-zero mean leads to more intricate optical power constraints and design objective functions than the case of zero mean, the TPC design that can support a general modulation is still an open problem. In the paper, we conceive of a general solution of the TPC scheme combined with dimming control for multiuser VLC systems, which is capable of mitigating multiuser interference, while at the same time, achieving the desired dimming level. The proposed scheme is applicable to a wide range of modulations in VLC, such as pulse amplitude modulation (PAM), PPM, and so on. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the traditional pseudo-inverse-based zero-forcing TPC in terms of bit error rate (BER).