DC-informative subcarrier intensity modulation for visible light communication

In this paper, the performance of direct current informative subcarrier intensity modulation (DCI-SIM) which is proposed to enhance the power efficiency of subcarrier intensity modulation (SIM) is investigated in visible light communication. The BER performance of DCI-SIM is compared with SIM, pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) and, enhanced unipolar orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (eU-OFDM) for different spectral efficiencies. Using analytical derivations and simulation results, we show that the DCI-SIM is the most power efficient modulation technique among others, and that the power efficiency increases with the spectral efficiency. Furthermore, we optimize the constellation of 64-DCI-SIM and present the results.