AC-FPSK modulation for low-energy and low data rate optical wireless communications

This article proposes an amalgam of phase-shift keying and asymmetrically clipped frequency-shift keying (i.e., AC-FPSK) for low-energy/low-data rate optical wireless communications. We design a near-optimal, low-complexity harmonic receiver by analyzing the AC-FPSK time-domain (TD) and frequency-domain (FD) waveforms. The Euclidean distance analysis between AC-FPSK waveform pairs yields lower and upper bounds for theoretical bit error probability. Using numerical simulations, we present an exhaustive evaluation of the optimal cardinality of PSK, which illustrates the superiority of AC-FPSK. We show that AC-FPSK provides better energy efficiency versus spectral efficiency trade-off than state-of-the-art AC-FSK, direct current-FPSK, pulse amplitude modulation, and asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. We also demonstrate that by making a suitable choice for the cardinality of PSK, the proposed 2-tap harmonic receiver for AC-FPSK can reach a similar complexity as the AC-FSK harmonic receiver.