Spatial modulation (SM) is a recently developed transmission technique that uses multiple antennas. The basic idea is to map a block of information bits to two information carrying units: 1) a symbol that was chosen from a constellation diagram and 2) a unique transmit antenna number that was chosen from a set of transmit antennas. The use of the transmit antenna number as an information-bearing unit increases the overall spectral efficiency by the base-two logarithm of the number of transmit antennas. At the receiver, a maximum receive ratio combining algorithm is used to retrieve the transmitted block of information bits. Here, we apply SM to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission. We develop an analytical approach for symbol error ratio (SER) analysis of the SM algorithm in independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh channels. The analytical and simulation results closely match. The performance and the receiver complexity of the SM-OFDM technique are compared to those of the vertical Bell Labs layered space-time (V-BLAST-OFDM) and Alamouti-OFDM algorithms. V-BLAST uses minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection with ordered successive interference cancellation. The combined effect of spatial correlation, mutual antenna coupling, and Rician fading on both coded and uncoded systems are presented. It is shown that, for the same spectral efficiency, SM results in a reduction of around 90% in receiver complexity as compared to V-BLAST and nearly the same receiver complexity as Alamouti. In addition, we show that SM achieves better performance in all studied channel conditions, as compared with other techniques. It is also shown to efficiently work for any configuration of transmit and receive antennas, even for the case of fewer receive antennas than transmit antennas.

In this paper, the impact of clipping noise on optical wireless communication (OWC) systems employing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is investigated. The two existing optical OFDM (O-OFDM) transmission schemes, asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and direct-current-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM), are studied. Time domain signal clipping generally results from direct current (DC) biasing and/or from physical limitations of the transmitter front-end. These include insufficient forward biasing and the maximum power driving limit of the emitter. The clipping noise can be modeled according to the Bussgang theorem and the central limit theorem (CLT) as attenuation of the data-carrying subcarriers at the receiver and addition of zero-mean complex-valued Gaussian noise. Analytical expressions for the attenuation factor and the clipping noise variance are determined in closed-form and employed in the derivation of the electrical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The validity of the model is verified through a Monte Carlo bit-error ratio (BER) simulation. Finally, the BER performance of ACO-OFDM with DCO-OFDM is compared for different clipping levels and multi-level quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) schemes.

A novel modulation technique coined SIM-OFDM was recently proposed. SIM-OFDM uses different frequency carrier states to convey information and leads to increased performance in comparison to conventional OFDM. Additionally, its innovative structure can lead to a decrease of the peak system power, which is highly beneficial in the context of optical wireless communication. One of the issues of the original SIM-OFDM scheme is a potential bit error propagation which could lead to significant burst errors. The current paper proposes a modified technique which avoids bit error propagation whilst retaining the benefits of the concept.

A novel modulation technique coined U-OFDM is proposed. U-OFDM uses different time sample states and an innovative rearrangement of the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) frame which allow for the creation of unipolar OFDM signals required for Optical Wireless Communication (OWC) with Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). In comparison to similar techniques like DC-biased Optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) and Asymmetrically Clipped Optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM), U-OFDM is both optically and electrically more power efficient in an Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel, which is prevalent in an optical wireless system.

In this paper, Sphere Decoding (SD) algorithms for Spatial Modulation (SM) are developed to reduce the computational complexity of Maximum-Likelihood (ML) detectors. Two SDs specifically designed for SM are proposed and analysed in terms of Bit Error Ratio (BER) and computational complexity. Using Monte Carlo simulations and mathematical analysis, it is shown that by carefully choosing the initial radius the proposed sphere decoder algorithms offer the same BER as ML detection, with a significant reduction in the computational complexity. A tight closed form expression for the BER performance of SM-SD is derived in the paper, along with an algorithm for choosing the initial radius which provides near to optimum performance. Also, it is shown that none of the proposed SDs are always superior to the others, but the best SD to use depends on the target spectral efficiency. The computational complexity trade-off offered by the proposed solutions is studied via analysis and simulation, and is shown to validate our findings. Finally, the performance of SM-SDs are compared to Spatial Multiplexing (SMX) applying ML decoder and applying SD. It is shown that for the same spectral efficiency, SM-SD offers up to 84% reduction in complexity compared to SMX-SD, with up to 1 dB better BER performance than SMX-ML decoder.

This paper presents a complete analytical framework for modeling memoryless nonlinear effects in an intensity modulation and direct detection optical wireless communication system based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. The theory employs the Bussgang theorem, which is widely accepted as a means to characterize the impact of nonlinear distortions on normally distributed signals. This paper proposes a new method to generalize this approach, and it describes how a closed-form analytical expression for the system bit error rate can be obtained for an arbitrary memoryless distortion. Major distortion effects at the transmitter stage such as quantization and nonlinearity from the light emitting diode are analyzed. Four known orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing-based modulation schemes for optical communication are considered in this paper: direct-current-biased optical OFDM, asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM, pulse-amplitude-modulated discrete multitone modulation, and unipolar orthogonal frequency division multiplexing.