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Optical Spatial Modulation

Raed Mesleh, Hany Elgala, and Harald Haas
AbstractIn this paper, a power and bandwidth efficient
pulsed modulation technique for optical wireless (OW) communication is proposed. The scheme is called optical spatial modulation (OSM). In OSM, multiple transmit units exist where
only one transmitter is active at any given time instance. The
spatially separated transmit units are considered as spatial
constellation points. Each unique sequence of incoming data
bits is mapped to one of the spatial constellation points, i.e.,
activating one of the transmit units. This is the fundamental
concept of the spatial modulation (SM) technique. In OW
communication systems, the active transmitter radiates a
certain intensity level at a particular time instance. At the
receiver side, the optimal SM detector is used to estimate the
active transmitter index. An overall increase in the data rate
by the base 2 logarithm of the number of transmit units is
achieved. The optical MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output)
channel and the channel impulse response are obtained via
Monte Carlo simulations by applying ray tracing techniques.
It will be shown in this paper that the optical MIMO channel
is highly correlated if transmitter and receiver locations are
not optimized, which results in a significant power penalty.
The power efficiency can be improved by increasing the
number of receive units to enhance receive diversity and/or
by using soft and hard channel coding techniques. Conversely,
it is shown that aligning transmit and receive units creates
nearly uncorrelated channel paths and results in substantial
enhancements in system performance even as compared to
the diversity or coding gain. The resultant aligned scheme is
shown to be very efficient in terms of power and bandwidth
as compared to onoff keying, pulse position modulation,
and pulse amplitude modulation. In this paper also, the
upper bound bit error ratios of coded and uncoded OSM are
analyzed. The analytical results are validated via Monte Carlo
simulations and the results demonstrate a close match.
Index TermsDirect detection; Diversity; Hard coding;
Intensity modulation; Multiple input multiple output; Optical
wireless communication; Onoff keying; Pulse amplitude
modulation; Pulse position modulation; Spatial modulation;
Soft coding.

I. I NTRODUCTION
ecently, interest in optical wireless (OW) technology as
a promising approach complementary to radio frequency
(RF) technology has gained new momentum fueled by
significant deployments in solid state lighting technology. Also,

Manuscript received July 9, 2010; revised November 12, 2010; accepted

January 25, 2011; published February 28, 2011 (Doc. ID 131442).
Raed Mesleh (e-mail: raed.mesleh@ieee.org) was previously with Jacobs
University and is currently with the University of Tabuk, Electrical Engineering
Department, 71491 Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.
Hany Elgala (e-mail: h.elgala@jacobs-university.de) is with Jacobs University,
Department of Electrical Engineering and Science, D-28759 Bremen, Germany.
Harald Haas (e-mail: h.haas@ed.ac.uk) is with the University of Edinburgh,
Institute for Digital Communications, The Kings Buildings, Edinburgh EH9 3JL,
UK.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1364/JOCN.3.000234

1943-0620/11/030234-11/$15.00

there are certain locations where the use of radio frequencies

is ill-advised, such as hospitals and installations containing
navigation equipment as in airplanes. OW systems do not
suffer from such restrictions. An OW communication system
relies on optical radiation to convey information in free space.
The transmitter/source converts the electrical signal to an
optical signal and the receiver/detector converts the optical
power into electrical current.
For OW indoor applications the use of LEDs (light
emitting diodes) as light sources is preferred due to relaxed
safety regulations, low cost, and high reliability compared to
LDs (laser diodes) [1]. Simple and low cost optical carrier
modulation and demodulation are usually achieved through
intensity modulation (IM) with direct detection (DD) [1]. The
desired waveform is modulated onto the instantaneous power
of the optical carrier and the detector generates a current
proportional to the received instantaneous power, i.e., only
the intensity of the optical wave is detected and there is no
frequency or phase information.
The key design challenge for OW is to increase the data
rate while maintaining high power efficiency. For instance,
power efficient modulation techniques, such as pulse position
modulation (PPM), experience a major degradation in the
achieved data rate. The data rate can be enhanced by
considering a pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) technique
at the expense of a significant power penalty. A compromise
between power and bandwidth efficiencies can be achieved
by considering the onoff keying (OOK) modulation technique [1,2]. A significant boost of the data rate for OW systems
without increasing bandwidth or power is anticipated from the
use of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques.
MIMO techniques for RF systems have been studied
intensively over the last decade. As a result, the IEEE 802.11n
amendment is proposed to significantly improve network
throughput over previous wireless local area network (WLAN)
standards by using MIMO techniques [3]. The expected
maximum raw physical net bit rate is boosted from 54 Mbps
to 130 Mbps for two parallel streams and 600 Mbps for four
parallel streams.
A spatial multiplexing indoor MIMO technique for visible
light communication (VLC) technology using orthogonal
frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) was considered in [4].
It is shown that the channel is highly correlated, which
significantly degrades the bit error performance at different
locations inside the room. The performance can be enhanced
remarkably by considering an imaging diversity receivers
technique to de-correlate the MIMO channel matrix [5]. This
is achieved at the expense of placing a lens at the appropriate
location between the transmitters and the receivers for
line-of-sight (LOS) paths. Imaging receivers cannot collect
light over a field of view (FOV) as wide as for a non-imaging
angle diversity receiver, since the elements of the latter can
2011 Optical Society of America

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235

Fig. 1. (Color online) OSM communication system model. The LED mapper maps input bits to LED indices. Each sequence of log2 ( N t ) input bits
corresponds to a certain LED index.

be oriented in any direction. Also, the sizes of the imaging

lens and the detector array depend on the location and are
not suitable for all applications. Another OW MIMO system
with subcarrier multiplexing (SCM) is proposed in [6], where a
spatial multiplexing technique with zero-forcing (ZF) detection
is considered. The performance of the system depends on
the achievable SINR (signal to interference plus noise ratio)
values for different configurations. It is shown that with
transmitter semiangles 1 20 , the separation between
2

the transmit units and the receive units should be larger

than 1.5 m to achieve a bit-error ratio (BER) lower than
104 . Outdoor OW MIMO schemes with repetition coding
have been studied in [79] assuming OOK and PPM. Studies
show that OW systems are capable of obtaining spatial
diversity gains from repetition coding, unlike RF systems. The
alternative OW MIMO system in [10] proposes a modified
version of the Alamouti code which allows the use of unipolar
pulsed modulation techniques for IM/DD links. The idea was
generalized later to any number of transmit units in [11]
and it was shown that repetition codings are more efficient
techniques for OW links employing IM/DD.
This paper proposes a novel efficient power and bandwidth
OW single-carrier transmission technique called optical spatial
modulation (OSM). In OSM, multiple transmitters are
spatially separated inside a room, where only one transmitter
is activated at any time instance and transmits a certain
intensity level (optical power). The active transmitter is
determined by the incoming bit sequence. If, for instance,
N t transmit units exist, log2 N t bits are mapped to each
transmitter index. This is, in principle, the same as the
proposed SM for RF systems [12]. At the receiver, the SM
optimum decoder [13] is used to estimate the active transmit
unit index.
The proposed OSM enhances the data rate by a factor
of log2 N t . However, the error performance depends on the

locations and directions of the transmit and receive units. It

is shown that when the transmit units are directed toward the
floor and the receive units are directed toward the ceiling in
a moderate size room, the performance of OSM deteriorates
due to the high optical channel correlation and a BER of
103 requires SNR > 20 dB. The same BER can be achieved
at 5 dB and 8 dB SNR for PPM and OOK, respectively [1].
This paper proposes an enhancement of OSM performance
by increasing the number of receive units and/or considering
channel coding techniques. Also, significant enhancement is
reported by proper alignment of transmit and receive units.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section II presents the OSM system model. Performance
analyses of uncoded, hard coded, and soft coded OSM systems
are presented in Section III. Performance analysis results are
presented in Section IV. Finally, Section V concludes the paper.

II. O PTICAL S PATIAL M ODULATION S YSTEM M ODEL

A. Uncoded OSM
The system model of the OSM approach is depicted in Fig. 1.
In Fig. 1, a MIMO system consisting of N t transmit units1
and N r receive units (photodiodes (PDs)) is illustrated. The bits
to be transmitted at each time instance, q(t), are grouped as
the row vectors of the matrix x(t). For illustration purposes,
the
bits to be transmitted
in three time slots are q(t) =

1 1 1 0 0 0 . Assuming N t = 4, each log2 (N t ) bits

are transmitted at one time instance and grouped as follows:

T
x (t) = 11{ t=1} 10{ t=2} 00{ t=3} , where ()T denotes the
transpose. The bits in this matrix are mapped to one of
1 A transmitter unit consists of one or more LEDs. The LEDs can be visible light
or infrared. In this paper, it is assumed that each transmit unit consists of a
single LED.

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Fig. 2. (Color online) Simulation of the optical channel inside the room
in Fig. 3. The channel impulse and magnitude responses are shown in
the figure. The channel impulse response is simulated for all transmit
units and for different z and 1 angles. The one depicted here is for
2

TX2 with z = 6 m and 1 = 60 . The receiver FOV is 90 . A 3 dB

2

channel bandwidth of 30 MHz and a channel delay spread of about

17 ns can be fairly assumed.

the transmitting LEDs. The selected LED (`) transmits

a non-return to zero (NRZ) pulse with an optical power
(intensity) s ` = P t at a particular time instance and all other
units remain silent. The intensity level carries no information
and can be utilized to optimize power consumption. In the
example considered, assuming mapping as seen in the table
in Fig. 1, the resultant matrix is given by

Fig. 3. (Color online) 4 4 optical MIMO model in a room. The

transmitters are located at the corners of the ceilings of the room and
the receivers are located on a table in the office with a height of 1 m.
The room dimensions in meters are 4 4 8 m3 .

noise vector. The noise is the sum of the receiver thermal noise
and shot noise due to ambient light, which can be modeled
as independent and identically distributed additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN) with double-sided power spectral
density 2 [1, Eq. (21)]. For the analysis in this paper, H(t) is
an N r N t (K + 1) normalized indoor optical MIMO channel
tensor, where K is the number of channel reflection paths
considered, defined as

0
s(t) =
s
`
0{ t=1}

s`

s` { t=2}

0{ t=3}

(1)

Each column from the matrix s(t) is transmitted at a single

time instance from the existing transmit units over the optical
MIMO channel H(t). For instance, at the first time instance in
the example considered, the elements of the first column are
transmitted. Since, however, only one element is different from
zero, only one transmitter emits a signal. This means that only
the third transmitter is active at this particular time instance
while all other units are switched off.
The received signal can be written as
p
H(t) s(t) + n(t),

h12 (t)

h1 N t (t)

h21 (t)

H (t) =
..

h22 (t)
..
.

..

h2 N t (t)
..
.

h Nr 2 (t)

h Nr 1 (t)

where each element in this matrix corresponds to the intensity

level that is transmitted from the transmit units at a specific
time instance.

y(t) =

h11 (t)

(2)

r 2 P r2
where denotes time convolution, =
is the average
2

electrical SNR at each receive unit, r is the PD responsivity,

PN
i
P r = N1 i=r1 P r( ) is the average received optical power at
r
P
i
k
each receive unit with P r( ) = K
h ( ) P being the average
k=0 i ` t
received optical power at receive unit i when transmit unit `
k
is active, and h (i`) is the channel path gain between transmit
k
unit ` and receive unit i for the kth path given by h (i`) =
R ( k)
h i ` (t) dt. The notation n(t) indicates an N r -dimensional

(3)

h Nr N t (t)

h
i
(0)
(K )
where h i j (t) = h i j (t) h i j (t) is a vector containing
the channel paths between transmit unit j and receive unit i
obtained numerically via a ray tracing technique as discussed
in detail in [14, Eq. (13)]. An example of the simulated channel
paths between transmit unit 2 and receive unit 1, are shown in
Fig. 2.

In this paper, the optical MIMO channel is simulated inside

the room depicted in Fig. 3. An example of the channel impulse
and magnitude responses, between the second transmitter
(TX2) and the first receiver (RX1), are shown in Fig. 2 with
the transmitter and receiver locations as shown in Fig. 3. It is
found that the 3 dB bandwidth is 30 MHz and that the channel
delay spread is approximately 17 ns. At this delay spread, 96%
of the overall transmitted power is captured.
At the receiver, the PD converts the optical signal to an
electrical signal and applies the optimal SM detector [13] to
retrieve the active transmit unit index as follows:

` = arg max p y y | s , H
`

p
= arg min h` s ` 2 2 yT h` s ` ,
`

(4)

where ` is the estimated transmit unit index, h` =

hX
iT
XK
K ( k) XK ( k)
( k)

is an N r -dimenk=0 h 1`
k=0 h 2`
k=0 h N `
r

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237

(
(
Fig. 4. (Color online) The convolutional channel encoder considered in this paper. A rate 1/2 convolutional encoder with octal representation (5,
7), constraint length of 3, and a free distance of d free = 5 is taken from [15, Fig. 1]. The figure shows also the state diagram and the transfer
function of the augmented state diagram of the encoder.

sional vector containing the sum of the channel path gains from

= h1 h2 h N
transmit unit ` to each receive unit, H
t
is the channel matrix after the optical to electrical conversion
at the receiver, s is the transmitted column vector from the
matrix s(t) at this time instance, and

= N t exp y p H
s2
p y y | s , H
F

(5)

is the probability density function (pdf) of y conditioned on the

The notation F
transmitted vector s and the channel H.
stands for the Frobenius norm of a vector or a matrix.

For soft decision decoding, the log likelihood ratios (LLRs)

are first calculated from Eq. (2) and then processed by the
Viterbi decoder. It is assumed that the transmitted bits are
independent and generated with equal probability due to the
interleaver. The calculation of the LLRs for the th spatial
constellation bit is as follows [16]:
L(` ) = log

`L 1
`L 0

= log

For coded OSM, q (t) is first encoded by a convolutional

encoder. The convolutional channel encoder considered is
depicted in Fig. 4 together with the encoder state diagram and
the transfer function [15]. A rate 1/2 convolutional encoder
with octal representation (5, 7), constraint length of 3, and a
free distance of d free = 5 is considered.
The encoded data are then interleaved by a random block
interleaver. The interleaved bits are processed and transmitted
as discussed in the above subsection. At the receiver, hard
and soft decision decoding are considered. For hard decision,
the transmitted bits are retrieved using Eq. (4) and then
deinterleaved by the random deinterleaver. The deinterleaved
bits are decoded by a hard decision Viterbi decoder.

P (` = 0 | y)

P
P ` = `
py y | H

= log P

The estimated transmit unit index ` is then used to retrieve

the original information bits by an inverse mapping process
using the same mapping table as is used in the transmitter.

B. Coded OSM

P ` = 1 | y

`L 1

P ` = `
py y | H


yh s ` 2
`
exp
2

,
yh s ` 2
P
`
exp
2

`L 0

(6)

where L = {1 : N t } is the set of spatial constellation points,

and L 1 and L 0 are subsets from L containing the transmitter
indices which have 1 and 0 at the th bit, respectively. The
calculated LLRs are deinterleaved and then decoded by the soft
Viterbi decoder.

III. P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS

A. Uncoded OSM Performance Analysis
OSM is a special case of SM where the digital modulation
order is not considered. This is similar to the proposed space

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shift keying (SSK) for RF systems [17]. The upper bound BER
performance of SSK is derived in [17, Eq. (5)] and a tighter
bound is proposed in [18, Section III.C] for Rayleigh fading
channels. The optical channel is an AWGN channel and an
upper bound (BER BERUB ) for the OSM system is given by
BERUB =

Nt X
Nt
1 X
N (, ) PEP ( ) ,
N t =1 6==1

(7)

where N (, ) is the number of bit errors when choosing

instead of as the transmit unit index and the unit indices
are assumed to be transmitted with equal probability, which is
equal to 1/N t . The pairwise error probability, PEP ( ), can
be computed as follows:
PEP ( | h , h ) = Q

/4kh h k2F ,

Fig. 5. (Color online) Transmit and receive unit alignment scenario.

Each transmitreceive pair is directed toward each other.

(8)
of error for a soft coded OSM system is given by

p R

where Q (x) = 1/ 2 x+ exp t2 /2 dt is the Q-function.

BER BERsc
= (N t 1)

B. Hard Coded OSM Performance Analysis

dT (D, N)

Pt
dN
N =1,D =exp

N
Pt

=1 6==1

BER analysis for a hard coded SSK system is proposed

in [18]. The analysis is computed on the basis of the union
bounding technique and the transfer function of the
augmented state diagram of the convolutional encoder
T (D, N) [15,18]. The hard coded BER, BERhc , is then given by
BER BERhc =

+
X

ck Zk ,

(9)

k= d free

with Z k being defined as

X
k
k

p e (1 p)(k e) ,

k/e

e=( k+1)/2

1 k
Zk =
p k/2 (1 p)k/2

2
k/2

X
k

+
p e (1 p)(k e) ,
e=( k/2)+1 k/e

k odd
, (10)
k even

Nt X
Nt
X
1
N (, )Q
log2 (N t ) =1 6==1

2
h k h ,

(11)

and c k being weighting coefficients that can be obtained from

T (D, N) as follows:

+
X
dT (D, N)
=
ck D k .

dN
N =1 k= d

c k exp

k= d free

IV. N UMERICAL

AND

Nt
X

Nt
X

=1 6==1

!
2

kh h k

. (13)

S IMULATION R ESULTS

In the analysis, aligned and unaligned systems are

considered in the room depicted in Fig. 3. The room dimensions
in meters are 4 4 8 m3 . In an unaligned system, the
transmitter and receiver locations are as shown in Fig. 3.
The transmitter units are assumed to be perpendicular to
the ceiling and transmitting toward the floor. Similarly, the
receiver units are assumed to be perpendicular to the table
and looking at the ceilings. The receiver is assumed to have
complete knowledge of the channel, the PD responsivity is set
to r = 0.75 A/W, and the receiver FOV is set to 90 .
For an aligned system, the transmitters and receivers are
directed to each other as shown in Fig. 5. Also, the receiver
FOV is reduced to 45 .

where

p=

= (N t 1)

+
X

2
8 kh h k

(12)

free

In all figures, numerical and simulation results are presented for selected configurations. For Monte Carlo simulation
results, the number of simulated bits is a function of the SNR.
A higher number of bits is used for high SNR values. However,
the minimum number of transmitted bits for any SNR value is
106 . The height of the transmit units from the ground is given
by z in meters and the transmitter half-power angle is given by
1 in degrees.
2

C. Soft Coded OSM Performance Analysis

A. Diversity Gain

The analysis for a soft coded system follows from [19, Section
8.2.3] on noting that Q (x) exp( x2 /2). A symbol error occurs
when the active transmitter LED index, , is estimated as
another index from the N t 1 indices. Then, the probability

The results depicted in Figs. 6, 7, and 8 relate to the effect of

increasing the number of receive units on the performance of
an uncoded OSM system, diversity gain. A single receive unit
is considered in Fig. 6, four receive units in Fig. 7, and eight

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239

Fig. 6. (Color online) Uncoded OSM performance analysis for N t = 4 and N r = 1 systems. In the left subfigure, 1 values of 35 , 40 , and 60
2

are considered at z = 6 m. In the right subfigure, transmit units are considered at heights z = 5, 6.5, and 8 m for 1 = 30 .
2

Fig. 7. (Color online) Uncoded OSM performance analysis for N t = 4 and N r = 4 systems. In the left subfigure, 1 values of 35 , 40 , and 60
2

are considered at z = 6 m. In the right subfigure, transmit units are considered at heights z = 5, 6.5, and 8 m for 1 = 30 .
2

receive units in Fig. 8. In all figures, N t = 4, z = 6 m for variable

1 angles, and 1 = 30 for variable z values.
2

The performance of OSM with a single receive unit, as

shown in Fig. 6, is very poor. For all 1 angles considered, a
2

BER less than 102 cannot be achieved even at SNR = 30 dB.

Also, a BER slightly less than 103 is achieved at z = 5 m. The
deficient performance can be explained by the high correlation
of the channel paths and the lack of receive diversity.

OSM performance can be significantly enhanced by increasing the number of receive units. A gain of about 9 dB and 15 dB
in SNR is noticed in Figs. 7 and 8 when increasing the number
of receive units to 4 and 8, respectively. The high gain is mainly
due to the increase of the rank of the MIMO channel matrix,
which decreases the correlation and enhances the performance.
It is noticed in all figures that the performance degrades
with increasing z and with increasing 1 . This, however, is
2

not due to the higher path loss at higher values, as the SNR

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Fig. 8. (Color online) Uncoded OSM performance analysis for N t = 4 and N r = 8 systems. In the left subfigure, 1 values of 35 , 40 , and 60
2

are considered at z = 6 m. In the right subfigure, transmit units are considered at heights z = 5, 6.5, and 8 m for 1 = 30 .
2

Fig. 9. (Color online) Simulated SNR values for a receiver array placed
horizontally in the room at a height of 1 m from the ground. The
transmit units are located at z = 6 m and the value of 1 is set to

Fig. 10. (Color online) Simulated SNR values for a receiver array
placed horizontally in the room at a height of 1 m from the ground.
The transmit units are located at z = 6 m and the value of 1 is set to

35 .

60 .

is the same for all curves; it is rather due to the correlation

between the channel paths, which is worse at higher values
of z and 1 . At higher values of z, the relative geometry
2

differences between the transmitters and receivers decreases,

which creates a high correlation environment. At very high
distance z, the correlation is very high and the transmitters
can be considered as point sources in the geometry. Likewise,
a larger beam angle causes a spread of the optical power
in the room, which increases the channel correlation and
degrades the performance [20]. This behavior can be further
explained by considering Figs. 9 and 10. In both figures, the
SNR is simulated for the same room as shown in Fig. 3
and considering an array of receivers placed horizontally
in the room at z = 1 m. Each transmit unit consists of a

60 60 array of LEDs [21]. The simulation determines the

SNR, similarly to [21, Eqs. (4)(13)]. In Fig. 9, 1 = 35 is
2

considered, which achieves the best performance in Fig. 6.

The locations of the four receivers considered in Fig. 7 are
depicted in Fig. 9. It is evident that the receivers experience
different channel attenuations and consequently different SNR
values. This is in contrast to the case for the receivers in
Fig. 10, where 1 = 60 is considered. In this case, the
2

receivers have very similar SNR values and experience similar

channel attenuation. Accordingly, the channel correlation is
high, which degrades the system performance.

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Fig. 11. (Color online) Hard coded OSM performance analysis for N t = 4 and N r = 4 systems. In the left subfigure, 1 values of 35 , 40 , 50 ,
2

and 60 are considered at z = 6 m. In the right subfigure, transmit units are considered at heights z = 5, 6.5, and 8 m for 1 = 30 .
2

Fig. 12. (Color online) Soft coded OSM performance analysis for N t = 4 and N r = 4 systems. In the left subfigure, 1 values of 30 , 40 , 50 , and
2

60 are considered at z = 6 m. In the right subfigure, transmit units are considered at heights z = 5, 6.5, and 8 m for 1 = 30 .
2

B. Channel Coding Gain

The rate 1/2 convolutional encoder considered for coded
systems has a transfer function, T (D, N), given as follows [15]:
T (D, N) =

+
X k5 k4 k
ND 5
=
2
N
D .
1 2ND k=5

(14)

Also, Eqs. (9) and (13) are upper bounds and the summation in
both equations is terminated at the value of the free distance.

Hard coded results are depicted in Fig. 11 and soft coded

results are depicted in Fig. 12. In both figures, N t = N r = 4
and the UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system)
interleaving pattern [22] is considered.
Coding gain is obvious in both figures when compared to
the uncoded system in Fig. 7. Hard coding enhances the
performance by about 5 dB, while soft coding enhances the
performance by approximately 7 dB. The results also highlight
the advantage of the soft coding technique over hard coding.

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Fig. 13. (Color online) Uncoded OSM performance analysis for N t = 4 and N r = 4. The receive units are located in the middle of the room. Each
receiver is directed towards one of the transmitting units.

Soft coding results outperform hard coding results by about

23 dB.

a BER of about 105 at 10 dB SNR compared to about 25 dB

SNR required to achieve the same BER for an uncoded system
with four receive units.

C. TransmitterReceiver Alignment
D. OSM, OOK, PPM, and PAM Performance Comparison
In the last study, the receivers are moved to the middle of
the room. Each of the receivers is directed towards one of the
transmitters. The transmitters are assumed to be in the same
positions as in Fig. 3, but tilted towards the corresponding
receiver. In other words, a scenario is created such that each
receive unit receives maximum power when the corresponding
transmit unit is active. A channel with a LOS path and two
reflection paths, similar to the channel considered in obtaining
all previous results, is considered here as well. However, due to
the transmitterreceiver alignment, the LOS path dominates
and the received power over the reflection paths is very small.
This configuration creates an almost diagonal channel matrix,
i.e., a full rank channel matrix. Thereafter, the performance
is expected to be enhanced significantly and it indeed is.
Simulation and analytical results are depicted in Fig. 13. The
first point to note is that neither changing the angles nor
changing the heights affects the simulated BER performance.
However, analytical results demonstrate differences of about
0.10.3 dB for different configurations. The second important
point to note is the tremendously enhanced performance. For
the same number of transmit and receive units, a gain of at
least 14 dB in SNR is achieved. Again, this enhancement is
not due to lower path loss since the SNR is the same for all
systems compared; rather it is due to de-correlating the MIMO
channel matrix by properly aligning the transmit and receive
units. Further reduction in the FOV creates a diagonal channel
matrix and enhances the performance. Conversely, larger FOV
and/or misalignment of transmitter and receiver positions
increases the correlation between the channel paths and
degrades the performance. The suggested alignment allows for

The performance of the aligned OSM system is compared

to the performances of OOK, 4-PPM, and 4-PAM [1,2] as
shown in Fig. 14. It is assumed that all systems achieve the
same electrical SNR at the receiver. In OSM, an NRZ pulse is
transmitted at each time instance from a single transmit unit.
Hence, for the same SNR, the output average optical power
is exactly the same for all compared systems. Also, the BER
equations as a function of the SNR ( ) and the data rates as
a function of the bandwidth (B) for all modulation techniques
are listed in Table I.
The PPM technique is the best technique in terms of
power efficiency. For instance, 4-PPM achieves a BER of about
104 at an SNR of approximately 6 dB. For the same BER,
9 dB, 9.5 dB, and 18 dB SNR are needed for OSM, OOK,
and 4-PAM, respectively. However, the 4-PPM technique is
the worst technique in terms of bandwidth efficiency. Only
half of the data rate as compared to OOK and a quarter of
the data rate as compared to OSM with N t = 4 and 4-PAM
can be achieved. The proposed OSM technique achieves a
performance that is slightly better than OOK and enhances
the data rate of OOK by a factor of log2 (N t ). The same data
rate is achieved by PAM but with significant power penalty.

V. C ONCLUSIONS
This paper proposes a pulsed modulation technique for
OW communication. The technique uses multiple transmit

Mesleh et al.

VOL. 3, NO. 3/MARCH 2011/J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW.

243

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
We gratefully acknowledge the support for this work from
EADS Germany and Airbus Germany. In addition, we
acknowledge the support from the German Federal Ministry
of Economics and Technology (BMWi) under grant 20K0806G
as part of the Lufo 2nd Call project SINTEG (Gefrdert vom
Bundesministerium fur Wirtschaft und Technologie aufgrund
eines Beschlusses des Deutschen Bundestages).
This paper was presented in part at the IEEE International
Conference on Communications (ICC10), 2227 May 2010,
Cape Town, South Africa.
This paper was presented in part at the IEEE International
Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC10), 2629 September 2010, Istanbul, Turkey.

Fig. 14. (Color online) Performance comparison of aligned OSM, OOK,

4-PPM, and 4-PAM. All systems have the same average electrical SNR
corresponding to the same average output optical power. The achieved
data rate for each system assuming a bandwidth of 30 MHz is also
reported.

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OSM, OOK, PPM,

AND

TABLE I
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Raed Mesleh (S00M08) received a B.Sc.

degree in communication engineering from
Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan, in 2000,
an M.Sc. degree in communication technology
from Ulm University, Ulm, Germany, in 2004,
and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering
from Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany,
in 2007. In October 2010, he joined the
University of Tabuk in Saudi Arabia where he
is now an Assistant Professor in the Electrical
Engineering Department. From September 2007 until September
2010, he had been with the School of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany, where he
worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow. His main research interests are
in wireless communication and optical wireless communication with
particular focus on MIMO techniques. He is a co-inventor of seven
patents, three of them already granted, in the field of RF and optical
wireless communication systems.

Mesleh et al.
Dr. Mesleh received a tuition waiver for his Ph.D. study at Jacobs
University along with a three-year scholarship. In 2003, he received
the award for the best student performance in the M.Sc. course at Ulm
University (LEG award) and, in 2000, he received the award for the
best graduate communication engineer in year 2000 from Yarmouk
University. Dr. Mesleh joined Orange in Amman, Jordan (20002001),
as a System Engineer and worked as a consultant for NOKIA is Saudi
Arabia from 2001 to 2002. Dr. Mesleh serves as a technical reviewer for
several IEEE transaction journals and international conferences and
he is a TPC member for several international conferences in wireless
communications.
Hany Elgala (S02M10) received a Ph.D.
degree from Jacobs University Bremen in 2010.
He received a B.Sc. degree in electronics and
communications from Ain-shams University
in 2000 and completed his M.Sc. degree
in microsystems engineering at Furtwangen
University in 2003. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science at Jacobs
University. Since 2005 he has been conducting
research on indoor optical wireless communication. His main research
interests are in the areas of communication systems, digital signal
processing, and circuit design.

Harald Haas (SM98AM00M03) received a

Ph.D. degree from the University of Edinburgh
in 2001. His main research interests are in
the areas of wireless system design/analysis
and digital signal processing, with a particular
focus on interference aware MAC protocols,
multiuser access, link adaptation, scheduling,
dynamic resource allocation, multiple-antenna
systems, and optical wireless communication.
He joined the International University
Bremen (Germany), now Jacobs University Bremen, in September
2002, where he is now Honorary Professor of Electrical Engineering.
In June 2007, he joined the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK),
where he is Professor of Mobile Communications in the Institute for
Digital Communications (IDCOM).
Dr. Haas received a best paper award at the International
Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications
(PIMRC) in Osaka/Japan in 1999 and holds more than 15 patents in
the area of wireless communications. Dr. Haas contributed a chapter
entitled Air Interface Requirements for Mobile Data Services to the
Handbook of Information Security published by John Wiley & Sons,
Inc. He co-authored a book entitled Next Generation Mobile Access
Technologies: Implementing TDD published by Cambridge University
Press. His work on optical wireless communication was selected for
publication in 100 Produkte der Zukunft (100 Products of the Future)
authored by Nobel Laureate T. W. Hnsch. Since 2007, Haas has been
a Regular High Level Visiting Scientist supported by the Chinese 111
program at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.