Spectral-Efficient Hybrid Dimming Scheme for Indoor Visible Light Communication: A Subcarrier Index Modulation Based Approach

Communication and illumination are two basic functions of the indoor visible light communication (VLC). In this paper, a novel spectral-efficient hybrid dimming scheme is proposed for the indoor VLC system, where the frequency-domain subcarrier selection is utilized to maximize the channel capacity and the intensity-domain dimming strategy is used to further adjust the illumination level. Simulations are carried out in both the indoor line-of-sight channel and the indoor multipath channel. Simulation results substantiate the superior performance of the proposed hybrid dimming scheme over the state-of-the-art schemes.