Combining Illumination Dimming Based on Pulse-Width Modulation With Visible-Light Communications Based on Discrete Multitone

In the field of indoor wireless networks, visible-light communications is garnering increasing attention. One of the type of emitters used in this technology is white light-emitting diodes, which can synergistically provide both illumination and data transmission. Discrete multitone modulation is attractive for visible-light communications. One of the issues to be addressed in these synergetic use cases is how to incorporate light dimming while not corrupting the communication link. In this paper, the performance of a visible-light communication system combining pulse-width modulation for dimming and discrete multitone for data transmission was investigated. Performance indicators were addressed, i.e., the signal-to-interference ratio due to dimming and the achievable bit-error ratio in the absence of additional noise. By aid of simulations it was shown that practical communication is only feasible when the line rate of the dimming modulation is at least twice the frequency assigned to the largest multitone subcarrier frequency. The results demonstrate that under this constraint and when using a suitably modified demodulation scheme, dimming does not influence the data transmission.