DC-Informative Joint Color-Frequency Modulation for Visible Light Communications

In this paper, we consider the problem of constellation design for a visible light communication (VLC) system using red/green/blue light-emitting diodes (RGB LED), and propose a method termed dc-informative joint color-frequency modulation (DCI-JCFM). This method jointly utilizes available diversity resources including different optical wavelengths, multiple baseband subcarriers, and adaptive dc-bias. Constellation is designed in a high-dimensional space, where the compact sphere packing advantage over lower dimensional counterparts is utilized. Taking into account multiple practical illumination constraints, a non-convex optimization problem is formulated, seeking the least error rate with a fixed spectral efficiency. The proposed scheme is compared with a decoupled scheme, where constellation is designed separately for each LED. Notable gains for DCI-JCFM are observed through simulations, where balanced, unbalanced, and very unbalanced color illuminations are considered.