User-Centric MIMO Techniques for Indoor Visible Light Communication Systems

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising technology to efficiently improve the achievable rate of white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) enabled visible light communication (VLC) systems. Nevertheless, for conventional MIMO techniques such as spatial diversity (SD) and spatial multiplexing (SMP), the working mode of each LED transmitter is independent of users' spatial positions. In this article, we propose and investigate three user-centric MIMO techniques, including SD/SMP switching, adaptive SMP (aSMP), and SD-aided aSMP (SD-aSMP), for achievable rate improvement of indoor MIMO-VLC systems, by exploiting users' spatial positions as a new degree of diversity. The analytical and simulation results show that the achievable rate of a 4 x 4 MIMO-VLC system in a typical indoor environment can be significantly improved by applying the user-centric MIMO techniques compared with the conventional ones. More specifically, SD/SMP switching can enjoy both high diversity gain of SD and high multiplexing gain of SMP at different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions, while aSMP mitigates the adverse effect of noise amplification in conventional SMP and SD-aSMP can benefit from additional diversity gain. Furthermore, we also show that the proposed user-centric MIMO techniques outperform conventional MIMO techniques under the condition of only slightly increased computational complexity with limited feedback information.