Performance of pulse-position modulation on measured non-directed indoor infrared channels

We examine the performance of pulse-position modulation (PPM) on measured channels with intersymbol interference (ISI). We summarize the bit-error-rate performance of unequalized systems and review the performance of maximum-likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) for PPM over ISI channels with additive white Gaussian noise. We evaluate the performance of PPM links over 46 experimentally measured indoor infrared channels. Detailed results are presented for 2, 4, 8, and 16-PPM at bit rates of 10 Mb/s and 30 Mb/s, and these techniques are compared to on-off keying. Our results show that when MLSD is employed, 16-PPM provides the best average-power efficiency among the modulation techniques considered in this study.