MIMO Optical Wireless Receiver Using Photodetectors with Different Fields of View

This paper describes a new form of receiver for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) optical wireless communications. The new receiver uses a number of photodetectors (PDs), all facing in the same direction but with different fields of view (FOVs). This enables a compact planar receiver structure. The performance of the receiver is analyzed for an indoor visible light communications system where LED lights are used as data transmitters. It is shown that the MIMO channel matrix has full rank for typical receiver positions and that for a given number of PDs, the new receiver provides much greater diversity than a conventional receiver of the same overall dimensions in which all of the PDs have the same FOV. Finally the overall bit error rate (BER) is presented for systems using asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) as the modulation scheme. Results are presented for both zero forcing (ZF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalization in the receiver. It is shown that the BER varies with receiver position, with relatively high values in the center and the corners of the room.