Subcarrier intensity modulation/spatial modulation for optical wireless communications

In this paper, we investigate a combination scheme of subcarrier intensity-modulation (SIM) with spatial modulation (SM) for optical wireless communication. Using computer simulation, the performances of the proposed SIM/SM scheme are investigated and compared with those of the conventional SIM scheme in the additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) as well as in outdoor environment with turbulence induced fading characteristics. Numerical results show that the proposed SIM/SM scheme can outperform the conventional SIM in an environment with different spectral efficiencies. When the spectral efficiency is varied from 2 bits/s/Hz to 4 bits/s/Hz, an Eb/N0 gain of 2 dB to 5 dB is achieved, when the bit error rate of 10^-5 is maintained. It shows that the employment of SM may further improve the power efficiency of SIM, when the number of subcarriers increases according to the spectral efficiency. When the spectral efficiency is 4 bits/s/Hz, the SIM/SM scheme for 0.5 of logirradiance variance in the log-normal turbulence channel shows the same performance as SIM with variance of 0.3. This means that the SIM/SM can be an alternative choice in even worse environments.