Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.7 CSK physical layer

Colour Shift Keying (CSK) modulates the intensity of the multi-colour light emitting diodes (LEDs) for information transmission in visible light communication (VLC). Currently, no work has been published which details the performance of this standardised modulation scheme that can be used by the CSK developers as a baseline. In this work, the various colour band combinations (CBCs) of multilevel CSK are studied and their performance over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and the dispersive optical wireless channel is detailed. The analysis of the performance evaluation suggests that CSK has a spread of BER performance, i.e. all the colour band combinations do not have the same BER performance. For the AWGN channel, CBC-2 (CBC no. 2) has an electrical SNR gain of up to 2.5 dB over the other eight CBCs of CSK. The performance evaluation suggests that the CBC-2 is also the most robust CBC of CSK to be used over the dispersive optical channel.