MC-CDMA Indoor Optical Wireless System

Multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) is a transmission scheme that combines the robustness of orthogonal modulation with the flexibility of CDMA schemes. It can lower the symbol rate and is therefore suited to the bandwidth limited optical wireless indoor channel. In this paper, new work is presented for an optical wireless (OW) system that utilizes MC-CDMA to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance. Our results indicate that at a BER of 10^-4 a 7 dB SNR improvement is obtained by a 4 user MC-CDMA OW system compared to a single user OW OOK system. This improvement is obtained while enabling multi-user communication. The performance degrades gradually as the number of users increases due to the increase in multiple access interference (MAI). A consistent BER performance is achieved for all receiver positions in a line strip spot-diffusing transmitter system (LSMS) with an angle diversity receiver, whereas a fluctuating BER performance is obtained in a conventional diffuse optical wireless system (CDS).