This paper investigates the performance of our recently proposed LED lamp arrangement to reduce the SNR fluctuation from different locations in the room for multi-user visible light communications. The LED lamp arrangement consists of 4 LED lamps positioned in the corners and 12 LED lamps spread evenly on a circle. Our studies show that the SNR fluctuation under such a LED lamp arrangement is reduced from 14.5 dB to 0.9 dB, which guarantees that users can obtain almost identical communication quality, regardless of their locations. After time domain zero-forcing (ZF) equalization, the BER performances and channel capacities of 100-Mbit/s and 200-Mbit/s bipolar on-off-keying (OOK) signal with most significant inter-symbol interference (ISI) are very close to that of the channel without any ISI caused by this LED lamp arrangement.

We investigate the performance of visible light communication (VLC) system with a pulse width modulation (PWM) dimming control scheme. Under this scheme, the communication quality in terms of number of transmitted bits and bit error rate (BER) of less than 10(-3) should be guaranteed. However, for on-off-keying (OOK) signal, the required data rate becomes 10 times as high as the original data rate when the duty cycle of dimming control signal is 0.1. To make the dimming control scheme easy to be implemented in VLC system, we propose the variable M-QAM OFDM VLC system, where M is adjusted according to the brightness of LED light in terms of duty cycle. The results show that with different duty cycles the required data rates are not higher than the original value and less LED lamp power is required to guarantee the communication quality, which makes the dimming control system that satisfies both communication and illumination requirements easy to be implemented and power-saving.

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In conventional visible light communication (VLC) dimming control systems utilizing pulse width modulation (PWM), reducing the duty cycle will push up the receiver sensitivity requirement if the transmission rate is kept constant. In this paper, we investigate a dimming control mechanism in indoor VLC to satisfy the receiver sensitivity requirement, which can achieve efficient data transmission while maintaining communication quality. To transmit excess signals, we propose a modification based on a conventional PWM scheme, which combines multi-pulse position modulation (MPPM) dimming control pulses with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals. Numerical results show that by utilizing the MPPM pattern effect, excess signals are transmitted, which can reduce the quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) symbol rate and alleviate the receiver sensitivity requirement under a steadily high data rate and a bit error rate (BER) that is less than 10 À3 .

We propose a scheme to improve the SNR distribution as well as the spectral efficiency of M-QAM OFDM signal for indoor visible light communication by tilting the receiver plane. Newton method is employed for the photo-detector to receive maximum power by finding the optimal tilting angle. This method is a fast algorithm that only three searching steps are needed. The simulation results show that in the case of one LED source, the maximum spectral efficiency improvement is 0.44bit/s/Hz when the launching power of LED source is 12W; while in the case of four LED sources, the maximum spectral efficiency improvement is 0.21bit/s/Hz when the total launching power of the four LED sources is 12W.