Spatial Modulation Applied to Optical Wireless Communications in Indoor LOS Environments

In this paper, we study the performance of Spatial Modulation (SM) applied to optical wireless communications (OWC) in indoor environments with line-of-sight (LOS) characteristics. To this end, we consider setup scenarios with different numbers of optical transmitters and receivers which are arranged within a room. SM is compared to Repetition Coding (RC). Because RC is known to achieve very good performance in OWC systems due to the use of intensity modulation and the resulting constructive superposition of the power signals. The results show that SM can outperform RC when high spectral efficiencies are desirable, e.g. 4 bit/s/Hz and greater, since it can operate with reduced signal modulation orders by conveying additional data bits in the spatial domain. We also demonstrate that SM benefits from receive-diversity to a larger extent while at the same time requiring less computational complexity. Furthermore, we give a general framework to numerically approximate the average bit error probability of both SM and RC.