Biased Multi-LED Beamforming for Multicarrier Visible Light Communications

Visible light communication (VLC) equipped with multiple light-emitting diodes (LEDs) can provide near ubiquitous indoor coverage for both communication and illumination. This paper introduces the concept of biased beamforming to explore the full potential of multicarrier multi-LED VLC systems. Biased beamforming includes two components to be jointly designed: a direct current (DC) bias on each LED and a beamforming vector on each subcarrier. We first analyze the impact on clipping in multi-LED VLC systems. Next, we consider the joint optimization of beamforming and biasing to maximize data rate. We find the optimal beamformer and analytically characterize its structure. We further optimize the bias on each LED and provide the globally optimal solution in closed form for flat channels, which leads to several critical insights that are helpful for practical systems. We also derive a simplified near-optimal solution for dispersive channels and develop an efficient method for biased beamforming. The performance of the proposed biased beamforming design outperforms existing solutions.