Channel-Aware Adaptive Physical-Layer Network Coding Over Relay-Assisted OFDM-VLC Networks

In this article, we propose and experimentally demonstrate the full-duplex channel-aware adaptive physical-layer network (APNC) coding over orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based visible light communication (VLC) to boost the capacity of relay-assisted VLC networks. The network encoding is realized by detecting signals coming from different terminal nodes simultaneously with a single photodiode at the relay node, which then achieves the amplify-and-forward function. At the receiver of each terminal node, the desired signal can be reconstructed by applying the corresponding APNC decoding to the detected interfered signal from the relay node. The use of adaptively loaded OFDM not only addresses the inherent frequency fading issue in VLC systems but also relaxes the synchronization issue at the relay node. The detailed principles of the proposed full-duplex channel-aware APNC scheme are presented, and its performance is experimentally investigated in a two-way-relay (TWR) VLC network. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme exhibits superior BER performance to other existing network scheduling schemes. For a TWR-VLC network with a fixed 600-Mb/s throughput, we achieve around two orders of magnitude reductions in the bit-error-rate (BER) by using the proposed channel-aware APNC scheme compared to other schemes, and BERs of 3.96 × 10
^-4
and 5.32 × 10
^-4
are attained for the two transmission links in the TWR network, respectively.