Multi-band carrier-less amplitude and phase modulation with decision feedback equalization for bandlimited VLC systems

This paper presents simulation results that show the principle of implementing multi-band carrierless amplitude and phase (m-CAP) modulation enhanced by the decision feedback equalizer (DFE) for a bandlimited visible light communications (VLC) system. When deploying different number of sub-carriers m = {1, 2, 5, 10}, we show the bit error rate (BER) performance of m-CAP over a fixed system bandwidth of 1 Hz with and without a DFE. We show that we can achieve a BER of 10−4 for the m-CAP system for m = {1, 2}, which is well below the 7% and 20% forward error correction (FEC) BER limits of 3.8×10−3 and 2×10−2, respectively.