Flexible Generalized Spatial Modulation for Visible Light Communications

Adaptive spatial modulation (ASM) varies the modulation size across the transmit light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to improve the overall spectral efficiency of visible light communication (VLC) systems. This article proposes a novel ASM scheme, referred to as flexible generalized spatial modulation (FGSM), for VLC systems. The proposed FGSM system changes the modulation sizes over the LEDs and the number of active LEDs, to improve the average symbol error rate (SER) and spectral efficiency compared to ASM with a fixed overall number of LEDs. The modulation sizes are selected in order to optimize the average SER under a predefined spectral efficiency value. A closed-form expression of approximate SER is derived along with decoding complexity calculations for the proposed system. Numerical results are provided to confirm the superiority of the proposed system and to support theoretical derivations.