Multi-band carrier-less amplitude and phase modulation for highly bandlimited visible light communications — Invited paper

In this paper we present new numerical results for the signal-to-noise ratio and bit error rate (BER) performances of multi-band carrier-less amplitude and phase (m-CAP) modulation in the context of a highly bandlimited visible light communications (VLC) link. Light-emitting diodes are used as the transmitter and are modelled in this work as an ideal first order analogue low-pass filter. The link bandwidth is given as unity, while the filter cut-off frequency is set to 0.1. The number of bands, or subcarriers, is selected as m = 1, 2, 5 and 10. Here, we show that under such a high bandwidth constraint, using m = 10 subcarriers can result in 40% and 17% improvement in bit rate compared to m = 1 and 2, and m = 5 subcarriers, respectively for the same BER target.