Cooperative Linear Precoding for Multi-User MISO Visible Light Communications

This paper develops and evaluates precoding techniques for coordinated joint transmission in visible light communications (VLC). A multi-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) setup is adopted. Transmitters are equipped with light emitting diode (LED) arrays, while receivers incorporate a single photodetector (PD). We design zero forcing (ZF) linear precoders considering, as figure of merit, the weighted sumrate for multilevel pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) and take into account the optical power constraints. We present two approaches. First, we formulate the design as a convex optimization problem and find its exact solution. Second, by considering certain approximations, we find an alternative precoder that despite being suboptimal can be computed in an almost closed-form, achieving a good trade-off between performance and complexity. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed approaches largely outperform the conventional pseudo-inverse precoding and single-user TDMA approaches.