MPPM based dimming control scheme in visible light communication systems

Abstract Visible light communication (VLC) has become a mainstream of optical wireless communication (OWC) and attracted considerable interest in both academia and industry. For the purpose of practical illumination, dimming control, which is utilized to provide variable levels of lighting brightness, has been identified as one of the key challenges in the field of VLC. In this study, we propose a novel dimming control scheme based on MPPM for VLC systems to support different dimming target values. To evaluate the performance of our proposed dimming control scheme, we apply it to H.264 scalable video coding bitstreams in a VLC system. The results show that the proposed dimming control scheme can support different dimming target values by introducing smaller dimming overheads and appending a lesser number of redundant bits on average with a lower symbol error rate of photodiode detection than the existing work, and also reveal that the proposed dimming control scheme can significantly enhance the throughput and improve the overall transmission efficiency of a VLC system.