MIMO Codes for Uniform Illumination across Space and Time in VLC with Dimming Control

Abstract: Indoor visible light communications (VLC) require simultaneous illumination and communication. Hence, uniformity in the illumination is a key consideration for user comfort and data transfer in VLC systems. Several run-length limited codes have been proposed in the literature which mitigate flicker for single input and single output VLC systems. Recently, codes have been proposed for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) VLC systems. However, uniform illumination along with dimming control has not been considered for MIMO VLC systems. Hence, in this paper, we propose codes with generalized algorithms for encoding and decoding that maintain consistency in the illumination across space and time and achieve the desired dimming level. We present the expressions for code rate, run-length, and Hamming distance for the proposed codes. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we compare the codeword error rate (CER) performance of the proposed codes with zero-forcing, minimum mean square error, and maximum likelihood detectors for various number of transmit and receive antennas. We also compare the mutual information of the proposed codes for various number of transmit and receive antennas. The numerical results show that the proposed codes exhibit good performance while satisfying the design criteria.