Performance Analysis of Repetition-Coding and Space-Time-Block-Coding as Transmitter Diversity Schemes for Indoor Optical Wireless Communications

The benefits of 2 x 1 multiple-inputs-single-output scheme for transmitter diversity in the infrared indoor optical wireless communication link are theoretically investigated. The performance of repetition-coding (RC) and Alamouti-type realvalued space-time-block-coding (STBC) as effective transmitter diversity schemes is systematically compared under conditions of channel gain variation caused by the degradation in the received optical power due to the blocking of one optical beam of the optical wireless channel. It is shown that the linear addition of channel gains in the RC scheme outperforms the root-sum-square of channel gains in the STBC scheme with regards to the bit-error-rate (BER) performance. Proof-of-concept experiments are carried out with both schemes under emulated scenarios of channel blockage. The RC scheme exhibits better BER performance when observed experimentally, validating the proposed theoretical model for the two spatial diversity schemes. To understand the performance of RC and STBC schemes against the optical delay caused by the two optical channel path difference within one-bit interval, both schemes are experimentally investigated using on-off-keying modulation, and results show that RC still outperforms STBC. Both theoretical and experimental results indicate that RC has better robustness to channel blockage and differential channel paths induced optical delay.