PAM sequence design for dimmable visible light communication

In current visible light communication (VLC) systems employing intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD), the transmitted optical intensity signal must satisfy the nonnegativity, peak optical intensity and illumination constraints. By taking into account the three constraints, we first present the signal space for the pulse amplitude modulated (PAM) sequences in the maximum flickering time period (MFTP). Then, to minimize the error probability of the VLC systems, we seek to find the PAM sequences providing the largest minimum Euclidean distance. Since the objective function is nonconvex and nondifferentiable, it is difficult to solve the original optimization problem directly. Thus, two methods corresponding to the joint design and greedy algorithm, are proposed to design the PAM sequences in VLC. The two methods offer a tradeoff between the symbol error rate (SER) performance and design complexity.