Constellation Design Enhancement for Color-Shift Keying Modulation of Quadrichromatic LEDs in Visible Light Communications

Quadrichromatic light-emitting diode (QLED) cluster is a four-color solid-state apparatus suitable for simultaneous illumination and communications. Unlike traditional red/green/blue (RGB) LEDs, its extra color provides not only one new wavelength-division multiplexing data channel but also better color quality in illumination. Taking full consideration of the high quality of color rendering index (CRI) requirement with tunable color temperature (CT), this paper investigates the constellation design of color shift keying (CSK) to maximize the minimum pairwise Euclidean distance (MED) for communication performance optimization. Beyond existing works, maintaining a high-level CRI with a specified CT complicates our design optimization problem. We propose to transform the CRI requirement into a set of linear constraints on one of the LED source composition while jointly incorporating the CT constraints. Both simulation results and prototype CSK communication testbed measurements based on commercial multicolor LEDs (LUMILEDS Luxeon C) illustrate that, under the same luminous flux and CT conditions, our proposed flux independent CSK constellation for QLEDs can significantly enhance the MED, bit error rate, and illumination color qualities.