A Novel Optical Wireless Modulation Exploiting Time, Frequency, and Amplitude Divisions Enabling Link and Illumination Reliability

The simultaneous task of data transmission and illumination achievable with Visible Light Communication is continuing to raise the interest of research and industry community. The joint use of the same infrastructure for illumination and communication may enable new location-based services, by implementing sensing functionalities. In this paper, we propose a new multi-dimensional modulation scheme combining different techniques, in order to increase the spectral and energy efficiency, while meeting the optical power emission constraints. Specifically, Pulse Position Modulation Pulse Amplitude Modulation and Frequency Shift Keying are effectively combined in a joint fashion, in order to exploit time, amplitude and frequency information. The innovation of using a smart combination of those modulation formats is based on the exploitation of specific features of the different approaches. In particular, we combine time, amplitude and frequency features to enhance the robustness of the system, without sacrificing the data rate performance as for coded systems. The major implication of such approach is twofold. In this way, we grant a constant illumination level per symbol and, moreover, we outperform in terms of reliability coded modulations for the same level of spectral efficiency. Theoretical results, validated through experimental evaluations, demonstrate that the combined approach achieves very good performance.