588 Vol. 5, No.

6 / December 2017 / Photonics Research Research Article

Spectrally efficient multi-band visible light

communication system based on Nyquist
PAM-8 modulation
NAN CHI,* MENGJIE ZHANG, JIANYANG SHI, AND YIHENG ZHAO
Department of Communication Science and Engineering, and Key Laboratory for Information Science of Electromagnetic Waves (MoE),
Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
*Corresponding author: [email protected]

Received 26 June 2017; revised 16 September 2017; accepted 18 September 2017; posted 18 September 2017 (Doc. ID 298297);
published 20 October 2017

High-speed multi-user access with high spectral efficiency is one of the key challenges for band-limited visible
light communication (VLC) systems. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for effective multiple-access VLC
systems based on multi-band, Nyquist-filtered pulse amplitude modulation (PAM)-8 modulation. Within this
scenario, the spectral efficiency can be improved from 1.5 to 2.73 b/s/Hz by implementing an appropriate Nyquist
filter to suppress spectral bandwidth. We experimentally demonstrate a multi-band VLC system at 1.2 Gb/s after
1 m indoor free space transmission. The system performances have also been thoroughly investigated for different
sub-band numbers, utilizing a rectangular filter in the frequency domain and a Nyquist filter based on square root
raised cosine. The results show that the Nyquist-filtered PAM-8 signal can outperform a rectangular filtered
signal. The maximum improvement of system capacity is up to 1.67 times for the Nyquist-filtered multi-band
system. The results clearly show the advantage and feasibility of multi-band Nyquist PAM for high-speed
multiple-access VLC systems. © 2017 Chinese Laser Press
OCIS codes: (060.0060) Fiber optics and optical communications; (060.2605) Free-space optical communication; (230.3670)
Light-emitting diodes.

https://doi.org/10.1364/PRJ.5.000588

1. INTRODUCTION one of the main obstacles to high-capacity VLC systems. Thus,

The rapid growth of demand in mobile data traffic has been the advanced modulation formats have been widely studied and
encouraging researchers to study new radio-access technologies found to provide high spectral efficiency and high data rate
that could be applied to the future fifth-generation (5G) access access; these formats include orthogonal frequency division
network. Meanwhile, visible light communication (VLC) based multiplexing (OFDM) [4], carrier-less amplitude and phase
on light-emitting diodes (LEDs) has become an attractive and (CAP) modulation [5], and pulse amplitude modulation
promising technology for short-range wireless communication, (PAM) [6]. Compared with OFDM and CAP modulation,
since LEDs can simultaneously provide illumination and PAM is relatively simple to implement in the real-time domain
communication [1,2]. In comparison to other radio-access because PAM, as a one-dimensional modulation, can be
technologies, VLC has advantages including being license-free, directly modulated in intensity. In comparison to OFDM,
immune to electromagnetic interference, cost effective, and there is no inverse fast Fourier transform, fast Fourier transform
strong in terms of security. Therefore, VLC is expected to (FFT), or electrical complex-to-real-value conversion required
be a potential candidate in next-generation access networks. in the PAM system [7]. In addition, compared with OFDM
For the 5G network, one of the key discussions is to support signals, PAM has better resistance to nonlinear behavior
a higher-access data rate with more than 1000 times capacity due to a lower peak-to-average power ratio [8]. Furthermore,
compared to the current long-term evolution (LTE) system [3]. no I/Q separation is required for PAM compared with CAP.
However, there are several challenges for VLC systems to pro- Therefore, PAM has attracted extensive attention from
vide high-speed multi-user access. researchers due to its simpler structure, lower computational
On the one hand, the intrinsic modulation bandwidth of complexity, and more flexible implementation.
commercially available phosphor-based white LED is limited to Since PAM can only be modulated in one dimension, the
the several-MHz range [2]. The limited bandwidth of LEDs is spectral efficiency of traditional PAM signals is relatively lower

2327-9125/17/060588-10 Journal © 2017 Chinese Laser Press

 Research Article Vol. 5, No. 6 / December 2017 / Photonics Research 589

than CAP and OFDM signals. Thus, some filtering schemes are numbers. The research indicates that appropriate guard interval
proposed to compress spectral bandwidth and improve spectral can slightly improve system performance. However, it may not
efficiency [9,10]. In Ref. [9], a duobinary filter is employed in a be cost efficient for the limited-bandwidth system as larger
PAM-4 system. The given bandwidth can be reduced by half, bandwidth reduces the spectral efficiency. In addition, the
but serious inter-symbol interference (ISI) will be introduced roll-off factor of the Nyquist filter is found to be an essential
by strong filtering to remove the upper part of the spectra. parameter of the system design. By carefully tuning the roll-off
Nyquist filtering based on square root raised cosine is another factor, the spectral efficiency can be improved from 1.5 to
effective method [10]. Utilizing the filter, the spectral bandwidth 2.73 b/s/Hz. Then, the system performances utilizing a rectan-
can be dynamically adjusted by the roll-off factor. Moreover, gular filter in the frequency domain and a Nyquist filter are
the undesired out-of-band power leakage can be effectively thoroughly investigated for different sub-band numbers. The
mitigated due to the suppression of the side lobes [11]. results show that the Nyquist-filtered PAM-8 signal can signifi-
On the other hand, VLC has traditionally been conceived as cantly outperform a rectangular filtered signal. In comparison
a point-to-point cable-replacement technique [2] whereas, to the system utilizing a rectangular filter, the capacities of the
from the network point of view, it is desirable for the VLC Nyquist filtering system with 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 sub-bands can be
to have the capability of supporting multiple user access. improved to be 1.54, 1.54, 1.67, 1.61, and 1.5 times higher,
Therefore, achieving efficient multi-user access is one of the respectively. However, the measured results show that the baud
hotspot research topics in VLC systems. Several approaches rate will degrade with the increasing of sub-bands, when the
have been reported for multi-band schemes [12–14]. In modulation bandwidth is close to the limit of the system band-
Refs. [12,13], the authors demonstrate a multi-band CAP sys- width. Therefore, in our future work, the optimal power allo-
tem with spectral efficiency up to 4.85 b/s/Hz by employing an cation combined with a bit-loading scheme will be further
adaptive bit-loading scheme. However, the highest total rate of researched to improve the multi-band system capacity.
the multi-band CAP system is only 31.53 Mb/s due to the lim-
ited modulation bandwidth of 6.5 MHz, and the transmission 2. PRINCIPLE OF MULTI-BAND NYQUIST PAM
rate for these high-index sub-bands is only several MHz.
Figure 1 shows the schematic diagram of the multi-band
In Ref. [14], multi-band OFDM signals are applied to
Nyquist PAM-8 system. The original bit sequences are first
multiple LED chips to avoid power fading and nonlinearity.
mapped into PAM-8 symbols; then the PAM symbols are
However, the scheme may not be cost-efficient, as more users
up-sampled to match the sample rate of the shaping filters.
need more LED chips. Additionally, the system is investigated
The sample rate is determined by the modulation bandwidth
under the modulation bandwidth of 1.95 to 30.27 MHz, so the
and the sub-band numbers. Subsequently, the Nyquist filter is
system can only provide a maximum capacity of 174.8 Mb/s
applied for pulse generation. The spectral bandwidth and un-
with three sub-bands. These systems are investigated based on a
desired out-of-band power leakage can be effectively suppressed
narrow modulation bandwidth. Additionally, the transmission
by the filter, and its impulse response in the time domain can be
rate is different for each sub-band, since the modulation order
expressed as [18]
selected in each sub-band depends on the measured signal to


noise ratio (SNR). But for PAM VLC systems occupying large t t t
sin π
1 − α  4α cos π
1  α
modulation bandwidth, there is still an absence of investiga- Ts T T
h
t 
 s 2  s ; (1)
tions to provide multi-band access solutions, as well as assign t t
uniform capacity to each sub-band. π T s 1 − 4α
Ts
In this paper, we propose a novel multi-band access scheme
based on Nyquist PAM-8 modulation to achieve high-speed where T s is the symbol duration and α is the roll-off factor
multi-user access. In this demonstration, the Nyquist filter is (generally between 0 and 1).
utilized to improve spectral efficiency by suppressing spectral The spectra of the Nyquist and traditional PAM schemes are
depicted in Fig. 2. The red line indicates the spectra of the
bandwidth and out-of-band emissions. Also, weighted pre-
Nyquist PAM and the blue line shows the spectra of traditional
equalization [15] is employed to adjust the power allocation
PAM. The traditional PAM signals show strong side lobes
of each sub-band and optimize the performance of all sub-
because the rectangular pulse shaping has sine-shaped response
bands. At the receiver, scalar modified constant multi-modulus in the frequency domain. Compared with the traditional PAM
algorithm (S-MCMMA)-based adaptive equalization [16] is scheme, the spectral bandwidth and side lobes of the Nyquist
employed to eliminate the ISI. For the first time to our knowl- PAM scheme can be significantly suppressed by the quasi-
edge, a multi-band PAM-8 VLC system based on a commer- square filter. Thus, higher spectral efficiency is successfully
cially available red LED is experimentally demonstrated with a obtained. It should be noted that about 50 dB side-lobe attenu-
data rate up to Gb/s. Total data rates of 1200, 900, 900, 870, ation can be achieved in Nyquist PAM, in comparison to the
and 810 Mb/s can be successfully achieved over 1 m indoor traditional PAM scheme. Therefore, the crosstalk between
free-space transmission when the sub-band numbers are 2, different sub-bands can be significantly mitigated in the
3, 4, 5, and 6, respectively. The measured bit error rate multi-band system based on frequency division multiplexing.
(BER) is under the 7% hard decision forward error correction In addition, the spectral shape of Nyquist PAM considering
(HD-FEC) limit of 3.8 × 10−3 [17]. different roll-off factors is illustrated in Fig. 3. It can be found
Additionally, the system performance is discussed from the that a narrower spectral bandwidth is obtained as the roll-off
aspect of the guard interval, filter parameters, and sub-band factor decreases. The spectral bandwidth is controlled by the
 590 Vol. 5, No. 6 / December 2017 / Photonics Research Research Article

Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the multi-band Nyquist PAM-8 system.

Fig. 2. Spectra of Nyquist PAM compared with traditional PAM.

Fig. 3. Spectral shape of Nyquist PAM considering different roll-off
factors.
roll-off factor α, and the spectral compression ratio can be
expressed as
1 − α∕2. Although the smaller α can obtain
higher spectral efficiency, more serious ISI will be introduced quality carried in high-frequency subcarriers. Finally, the
by spectral overlap. pre-weighted signal of each sub-band is added to form the
For multiple users, the transmission data of each sub-stream multi-band signal in the time domain.
are carried in different subcarrier frequencies by up-conversion. In terms of the receiver, the received signal of each band is
However, the performance of high-frequency sub-bands will multiplied by the matched subcarrier frequency and then
seriously deteriorate due to the low SNR induced by high- filtered by low-pass filter (LPF) to split the baseband signal
frequency attenuation. Therefore, a weighted pre-equalization component. After down-sampling, a decoder is utilized to ob-
scheme is employed to compensate the frequency attenuation, tain the original bit sequence. In this system, the shaping filter
and the power allocation of each band can be dynamically ad- pair consists of the Nyquist filter and up-conversion, and the
justed to optimize the performances of all sub-bands. In order matched filter pair includes down-conversion and LPF. They
to reduce the computational complexity, we make a simplifi- are matched to extract the desired sub-band signal from the
cation for the weighted pre-equalization scheme proposed in mixed multi-band signals, thus providing the possibility of
our previous work [15]. There is no need to measure and multi- application to multi-user access networks.
ple the reciprocal of the transfer function to compensate for the For a multi-band Nyquist PAM system with N sub-bands,
overall bandwidth, because the attenuation of high-frequency the shaping filter pair in the time domain can be given by [18]
components can be partially compensated by utilizing a self-
designed pre-equalizer [19]. The PAM signal of each sub-band hf p_n
t  h
t · cos
2πf n t; (2)
is only multiplied by a weighted coefficient An to adjust the
transmit power of each sub-band. With the increasing of
sub-band index n, An becomes larger and improves the signal wherein
 Research Article Vol. 5, No. 6 / December 2017 / Photonics Research 591



2n − 1
1  α 1; jf j ≤ 1α
fn : (3) H
f   2T s
; (13)
2T s 0; jf j > 1α
2T s
Here, f n is the subcarrier frequency of the nth sub-band. where T s is the symbol duration and α is the roll-off factor.
Assuming S n
t is the data carried in the nth sub-band after
PAM-8 mapping and up-sampling, An is the weighted coeffi-
cient for the nth sub-band, so the combined output signals S
t 3. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
can be expressed as The experimental setup of the multi-band VLC system based on
X
N   Nyquist PAM-8 modulation is shown in Fig. 4. The original
S
t  An ·
S n
t ⊗ hf p_n
t ; (4) data sequences are first generated in MATLAB and mapped into
n1 PAM-8 symbols. Then, N sets of sequences are up-sampled and
filtered by pulse-shaping filters to produce N -band Nyquist
X
N PAM-8 signals (N  1 − 6). To compensate for the high-
 An · S n0
t · cos
2πf n t; (5) frequency attenuation and optimize the overall performance
n1
of the sub-bands, the weighted coefficient is multiplied by
where “⊗” is the convolution symbol and S n0
t  S n
t ⊗ each sub-band. Insets (a) and (b) in Fig. 4 show the electrical
h
t is the Nyquist filtered PAM-8 signal. spectra of the received signal without and with weighted pre-
After free-space transmission, the received multi-band equalization. It can be found that the frequency response of
PAM-8 signal can be expressed as the high-frequency sub-bands can be significantly improved uti-
lizing the weighted pre-equalization. This makes it feasible to
X
N
R
t  An · S n0
t · cos
2πf n t  N 0
t; (6) load identical modulation orders to each sub-band signal.
n1
In our system, an RGB-LED (LZ4-00MA00, red: 621 nm;
green: 525 nm; blue: 460 nm) is utilized as the light source.
where N 0
t is the additive white Gaussian noise. Then the However, only the red chip is employed to transmit data for
received signal implements down-conversion by multiplying two reasons. First, our investigation is mainly focused on
the corresponding subcarrier frequency of each sub-band, so the multi-band signal carried in a single wavelength. Second,
the signal carried in the mth sub-band can be given by the frequency response of the red chip is more flat compared
XN with the green and blue chips [20]. Thus, the red chip has
0
R m
t  An S n
tcos
2πf n t  N 0
t · cos
2πf m t; larger system bandwidth and more sub-bands can be allocated
n1 in the red wavelength. It should be noted that blue and green
(7) lights should be simultaneously lighted in practical application
so as to form the white light for illuminating.
 Am S m0
t cos2
2πf m t  I m;n
t  I N
t; (8) In the experiment, the generated multi-band PAM signal is
fed into an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG, Tektronix
1 1 AWG710B) and passed through a self-designed bridged-
 Am S m0
t Am S m0
tcos
4πf m tI m;n
tI N
t; T-based pre-equalizer to compensate for the attenuation of
2 2 high-frequency components [19]. The bandwidth of the
(9) pre-equalizer is 250 MHz. After amplification by a mini-
wherein circuits electrical amplifier (EA, mini-circuits, 25-dB gain),
the electrical signal and DC-bias voltage are combined by a bias
X
N
tee and applied to the red chip of the RGB-LED. A reflection
I m;n
t  An S n0
t cos
2πf n t cos
2πf m t; (10)
n≠m
cup with 60° divergence angle is applied to the LED to decrease
the beam angle. The bias voltage and input signal peak-to-peak
value (Vpp) for the red chip is set as 2.1 and 0.3 V, respectively,
I N
t  N 0
t cos
2πf m t: (11)
to ensure the red chip works at the optimal condition [21]. The
In Eq. (9), the first term is the PAM signal carried in the mth transmission distance is 1 m.
sub-band. The second term is the second-order intermodula- At the receiver, a commercially available PIN photodiode
tion distortion between symbols located on the mth sub-band. (Hamamatsu 10784) is used as the receiver; it is equipped with
The third term is ICI between the mth sub-band and other sub- a lens (70 mm diameter and 100 mm focus length) to focus
bands, as shown in Eq. (10), and the fourth term is the noise light. The received signal is amplified by an EA and recorded
signal, as shown in Eq. (11). by a digital storage oscilloscope (DSO, Agilent DSO54855A)
Then, the signal is changed to the frequency domain for further offline signal processing. In offline signal processing,
through FFT transform. By passing an LPF, only the first term, after re-sampling and synchronization, a subcarrier phase-esti-
including the low-frequency component, can be retained. So mation algorithm is employed to correct the subcarrier phase
the baseband signal for the mth sub-band can be given by offset, which is introduced by the inconsistent sampling clock
between AWG and DSO. The calculated phase offset will be
1
R m0
t  Am S m0
t; (12) compensated in the matched filter pair to extract each sub-
2 band signal more accurately. After normalization and down-
and the frequency response for the LPF can be expressed as sampling, each sub-band PAM signal is equalized by an
 592 Vol. 5, No. 6 / December 2017 / Photonics Research Research Article

Fig. 4. Experimental setup of the multi-band VLC system based on Nyquist PAM-8 modulation. (a) Measured electrical spectra without weighted
pre-equalization; (b) measured electrical spectra with weighted pre-equalization; (c) experimental setup. Eq., pre-equalizer.

S-MCMMA-based adaptive equalizer to eliminate the ISI and the attenuation can be appropriately compensated and the
compensate for the channel loss [16]. The scheme is a blind −20 dB bandwidth of the system can be extended from 96
post-equalization without any training sequence aiding, so to 260 MHz.
the interaction is required for each symbol; this can be com- It is worth noting that the direct current and low-frequency
putationally costly depending on the tap number of the equal- component (less than 10 MHz) are also significantly attenuated
izer. In our system, the optimal tap number of the S-MCMMA due to the limitation of the bias tee. The bias tee used in our
equalizer is set as 21. Finally, the data is decoded to obtain the experiment is a bandpass device. Thus, we empty out the front
original bit sequence and calculate the BER. bandwidth of 10 MHz, where no signals are carried, to ensure
better performance can be obtained.
By pre-equalization, the modulation bandwidth is extended
4. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION from several tens of MHz to several hundreds of MHz, so
First, we measured the frequency response of the overall higher-speed data can be transmitted in the multi-band VLC
system, including the LED, pre-equalization circuit, EAs, bias system. Then, the system performance based on large modula-
tee, and PIN, as shown in Fig. 5. As can be seen, the tion bandwidth is investigated from the aspect of the guard in-
VLC system is highly band-limited and the −3 dB bandwidth terval, filter parameters, and sub-band numbers so as to explore
of our system is about 20 MHz, so the high-frequency signal the maximum system capacity of multi-band PAM systems.
suffers from severe attenuation. By employing pre-equalization,
A. Guard Interval
In this section, the influence of the guard interval between
different sub-bands is investigated. The measured BER perfor-
mance versus the bandwidth of the guard interval is depicted in
Fig. 6. In this demonstration, the baud rate of each sub-band is
set as 50 Mbaud. The roll-off factor of the filter is set as 0.2.
When no guard band is arranged, three sub-bands are located
on the different subcarrier frequencies of 40, 100, and
160 MHz. Then the guard interval increases in steps of
10 MHz, from 0 to 60 MHz. The measured results show that
the first sub-band remains the best performer. It can also be
demonstrated from the inset that the constellation for the first
band is clearer than the other two bands, and the BER perfor-
mance is stable with the increasing bandwidth of the guard
band. However, the performance of the second and third
sub-band will first be improved and then deteriorate. This is
Fig. 5. Measured frequency response of the overall VLC system. because the appropriate rising of the guard interval can mitigate
 Research Article Vol. 5, No. 6 / December 2017 / Photonics Research 593

B. Filter Parameters
According to the preceding analysis, the filter is required in
PAM systems to improve the spectral efficiency and minimize
the crosstalk between different sub-bands, and the spectral
compression degree is related to the roll-off factor of the
Nyquist filter. Therefore, the filter design is an essential factor
affecting the performance of multi-band systems. In this sec-
tion, we investigate the three-band system performance under
different filtering schemes.
The received signal spectra without filters, with the rectan-
gular filter in frequency domain, and with the Nyquist filter at
various roll-offs are presented in Fig. 7. The baud rate of each
sub-band is set as 50 Mbaud, so the spectral bandwidth of all
sub-bands without compression is 300 MHz. It can be seen
Fig. 6. BER performance versus the bandwidth of the guard band. that the spectra of the received signal without filters suffers seri-
ous damage and deformation, in particular for the first band
signal. This can be explained by the fact that the original
PAM signal has a very high side-lobe component, so the side
the crosstalk between different sub-bands, but the second and lobe signal from adjacent sub-bands will be superimposed on
third sub-bands will be carried in a higher frequency with the the main lobe signal. Therefore, it is necessary to suppress the
growth of the guard interval. Thus low SNR, induced by the side lobes by filters in the multi-band system. A common
high-frequency attenuation, will become the dominant effect. method is to utilize a rectangular filter in the frequency domain
Additionally, the second sub-band requires larger guard band to filter out the side lobe component. This is an ideal LPF,
compared to the other two sub-bands since it suffers more seri- which retains the main lobe component of signal spectra com-
ous crosstalk from both adjacent sub-bands. Therefore, an pletely. However, side-lobe components are entirely suppressed,
appropriate guard interval can improve system performance and thus bandwidth compression cannot be obtained using this
when the bandwidth resources are not considered. filter. The corresponding frequency-domain characteristics can
However, for the limited bandwidth system, the guard
be expressed as
interval may not be cost-efficient where larger bandwidth is

required—especially for when the modulation bandwidth 1; jf j ≤ T1s
reaches the limit of system bandwidth, as the performance deg- H
f   ; (14)
0; jf j > T1s
radation caused by high-frequency attenuation is more serious
than inter-band interference. Besides, we want to explore the where T s is the symbol duration.
maximum capacity of the system under limited bandwidth. No The measured results show that the spectra with rectangular
guard interval can make full use of bandwidth and improve filter is similar to the spectra with a Nyquist filter at α  1.
spectral efficiency. Therefore, no guard interval is considered In both cases, no bandwidth saving can be attained.
in our next investigation. However, for the Nyquist filter, the bandwidth compression

Fig. 7. Measured electrical spectra of received signal (a) without filters, (b) with the rectangular filter in frequency domain, and (c)–(h) with the
Nyquist filter at different roll-off factors. BW, bandwidth.
 594 Vol. 5, No. 6 / December 2017 / Photonics Research Research Article

can be successfully achieved by adjusting the roll-off factor. As Then, the system performance is investigated versus differ-
we can see from Figs. 7(c)–7(h), the bandwidth saving can be ent roll-off factors of the Nyquist filter. The measured results
improved as the roll-off factor decreases. Meanwhile, the spec- show that the highest transmission rate mainly depends on the
tral shape gradually changes to square, which is controlled by transmission performance of the third sub-band. Moreover,
the impulse response of the filter. However, the interval of with the increasing of baud rate, the performance of the sub-
different sub-bands decreases, which will introduce interference band occupying larger bandwidth will seriously degrade due to
between adjacent sub-bands. the high-frequency attenuation induced by limited bandwidth.
Additionally, we research the highest transmission rate at When the baud rate rises to 100 Mbaud, only the signal with a
different spectral compression degrees to seek out the optimal Nyquist filter at α  0.2 can render all sub-bands able to reach
system capacity, as shown in Fig. 8. Figures 8(a)–8(c) show the the BER threshold. In this case, the data rate of each sub-band
BER performance versus different filters for the first, second, is 300 Mb/s, so the aggregated data rate of 900 Mb/s for the
and third sub-bands, respectively. As we can see from the blue three-band system can be achieved with the BER under the 7%
curve in Figs. 8(a)–8(c), systems without any filter show poor FEC limit of 3.8 × 10−3 . Compared with the system utilizing a
BER performance because severe inter-band interference will rectangular filter, the system capacity has been increased by
be introduced by the unfiltered PAM signal with large side-lobe 53.85%. Moreover, a 40% bandwidth saving is successfully
components. The first sub-band especially suffers stronger low- achieved by the spectral suppression.
frequency noise interference, which is from the leaked side-lobe The highest baud rate and spectral efficiency achieved for
aggregated in the front emptied bandwidth. It can be found the system utilizing a Nyquist filter is demonstrated in
that the intensity of the low-frequency noise even exceeds Fig. 8(d) for different roll-off factors. The measured result
the signal, as shown in Fig. 7(a). Thus, the SNR of the first shows that the spectral efficiency gradually increases as the
sub-band is significantly inferior to other sub-bands, and shows roll-off factor decreases. By carefully turning the roll-off factor,
the poorest BER performance. However, the performance of the spectral efficiency can be improved from 1.5 to 2.73
the VLC system can be significantly improved by utilizing the b/s/Hz. However, the optimal transmission rate of 100 Mbaud
filter, and the BER performance of each sub-band can be with a spectral efficiency of 2.5 b/s/Hz is obtained at α  0.2.
reduced at least by an order of magnitude. When α is more than 0.2, the baud rate is gradually degraded as

Fig. 8. Measured results: (a)–(c) BER performance versus different filters for sub-bands 1–3. (d) Highest baud rate and spectral efficiency achieved
for the system utilizing Nyquist filter with different roll-off factors.
 Research Article Vol. 5, No. 6 / December 2017 / Photonics Research 595

the roll-off factor increases. This can be explained by the fact Consequently, a more identical frequency response for each
that a larger occupied bandwidth is required, so the signal car- sub-band can be obtained in the multi-band system.
ried in high frequency is seriously attenuated due to the limited The BER performance of each sub-band versus different
bandwidth of the LED. As shown in the insets, the bandwidth sub-band numbers is also measured, as depicted in Fig. 10.
of 100 Mbaud signal at α  0.2 is 360 MHz, while the band- It can be found that the BER performance of the low subcarrier
width of 65 Mbaud signal at α  1 is 390 MHz. However, index deteriorates with the increasing number of sub-bands.
smaller roll-off will decrease the interval between adjacent However, for the high subcarrier index, the BER performance
sub-bands, which induces more serious ICI. When less band- can be improved slightly as the result of transmitting power
width is occupied, the ICI becomes the dominant effect on sys- distribution induced by the adjustment of the weighted coef-
tem performance. It can be verified that the system capacity ficient. The SNR of sub-bands carried in high frequency en-
at α  0.1 is slightly inferior to the capacity at α  0.2. hanced for higher transmit power is assigned to compensate
Therefore, the system performance is the compromise between for high-frequency attenuation. However, the total transmitting
the spectral compression and ICI. The system capacity can be power is constant, so the power allocated to the low-index
significantly improved by appropriately decreasing the roll-off sub-band will be reduced to the maximum extent within its
factor, but too small a roll-off factor will also degrade perfor- allowable range. In addition, the degradation of overall BER
mance. According to the measured results, 0.2 is the optimal performance is caused by the more serious ICI introduced
roll-off factor for our system. by the smaller interval between sub-bands. However, the
BER performance of each sub-band tends to be uniform with
C. Sub-Band Numbers the increase of sub-bands. The insets show the constellation
In order to support more multi-user access, the system perfor- diagrams of the first sub-band signal located on the 2, 4, 5,
mance versus different sub-band numbers is discussed. The and 6 sub-band systems, respectively. It can be found that
received spectra with N  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 sub-bands is constellations deteriorate with the increasing of sub-bands.
illustrated in Fig. 9. In this demonstration, the roll-off factor The BERs for these four signals are 1.34 × 10−4 , 7.56 × 10−4 ,
is 0.2 and the overall spectral bandwidth is fixed at 288 MHz. 1 × 10−3 , and 1.6 × 10−3 , respectively.
Thus, the baud rates of each sub-band are set as follows: 240, Then we research the total capacity of the multi-band sys-
120, 80, 60, 48, and 40 Mbaud for sub-band number N  1, tem with Nyquist filter and rectangular filter in the frequency
2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, respectively. The measured results show that domain, versus different sub-band numbers, as shown in
the high-frequency component of the 1-sub system suffers from Fig. 11. Here, the solid line represents the total baud rate of
the most obvious attenuation. However, when the sub-band the system and the dashed line shows the baud rate of each
number increases, the high-frequency attenuation can be sub-band. It can be found that the system capacity can be sig-
gradually mitigated. Since more sub-bands are allocated, the nificantly improved using the Nyquist filter as opposed to the
smaller bandwidth is occupied by each sub-band. Thus, the rectangular filter. For the system with the Nyquist filter, the
frequency-dependent attenuation is minimized. Additionally, baud rate of each sub for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 sub-bands are
the weighted coefficient of each sub can be adjusted to allow 400, 200, 100, 75, 58, and 45 Mbaud, respectively. Namely,
more power to be allocated to sub-bands with low SNR. the aggregate bit rate is 1200, 1200, 900, 900, 870, and
810 Mb/s, so the maximum system capacity of 1.2 Gb/s is suc-
cessfully achieved in the 1 and 2 sub-band system based on
Nyquist filtering. However, the baud rate of each sub-band
with the rectangular filter is 300, 130, 65, 45, 36, and
30 Mbaud for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 sub-bands, respectively.
Thus, by employing the Nyquist filter, a capacity improvement

Fig. 10. Measured BER performance of each sub-band for different

Fig. 9. Measured electrical spectra with N  1 − 6 sub-bands. numbers of sub-bands.
 596 Vol. 5, No. 6 / December 2017 / Photonics Research Research Article

based on Nyquist PAM-8 modulation with one red LED. In

this demonstration, the Nyquist filter is utilized in the pulse-
shaping of each sub-band to improve spectral efficiency and
mitigate the out-of-band power leakage. Meanwhile, weighted
pre-equalization is employed to compensate for high-frequency
attenuation and adjust the power allocation of each sub-band.
The system performance based on large modulation bandwidth
is investigated from the aspect of the guard interval, filter
parameters, and sub-band numbers. The measured results show
that the optimal performance can be achieved at the 40% band-
width saving due to the compromise between spectral compres-
sion and crosstalk in different sub-bands. Moreover, in 1 m
indoor free-space transmission, the aggregate transmission rates
of 1200, 1200, 900, 900, 870, and 810 Mb/s can be success-
Fig. 11. Total capacity of multi-band system for different numbers fully achieved with the BER under 7% FEC limit of 3.8 × 10−3
of sub-bands.
for the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 sub-band systems, respectively. The
system performance utilizing a rectangular filter in the fre-
of 1.33, 1.54, 1.54, 1.67, 1.61, and 1.5 times can be success- quency domain and a Nyquist filter have also been thoroughly
fully obtained for the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 sub-band systems, investigated for different numbers of sub-bands. The results
respectively. show that the Nyquist-filtered PAM-8 signal can significantly
However, the measured results indicate that the baud rate of outperform the rectangular filtered signal. In comparison to
each sub-band will degrade with the increasing of sub-band the system utilizing the rectangular filter, the maximum im-
numbers. When sub-bands increase from 2 to 3, the system provement of system capacity is up to 1.67 times for the
total capacity significantly decreases. As sub-bands continue Nyquist-filtered multi-band system. The measured results
to grow, the decrease of system capacity becomes slight. The clearly demonstrate the advantage and feasibility of multi-band
decreasing of system capacity can be explained for two reasons. Nyquist PAM modulation for high-speed multi-user-access
First, more serious crosstalk between adjacent sub-bands is in- VLC systems.
troduced by the increase in sub-bands. Second, the modulation
order for each sub-band is fixed as 8. With the increasing of Funding. National Key Research and Development
sub-bands, the average SNR of the high-index sub-band will Program of China (2017YFB0403603).
degrade due to serious high-frequency attenuation. The low
SNR cannot support the transmission of signal with high-order
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