Rateless Adaptation for Mobile Visible Light Communications

Due to directional propagation of light signals, visible light communication (VLC) channel quality is sensitive to the distance and the angle between a VLC access point (AP) and a VLC terminal. When a terminal is mobile, VLC channel gain varies with the position of the terminal. Considering rotations of a terminal during mobility, channel variations are even more severe. As a result, data rates need to be adapted according to variable link qualities. The commonly used feedback-based adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) scheme cannot catch up with channel variations in VLC, resulting in staircase-shaped adaptation results. Smoother adaptation can be achieved by the seamless rate adaptation (SRA) scheme via rate compatible modulation (RCM). However, SRA does not provide an effective way to increase symbol distances, so the improvement on spectral efficiency is small. To address the shortcomings in the existing schemes, rateless adaptation (RLA) is developed for VLC systems in this paper based on spinal codes. With RLA, smooth rate adaptation is accomplished without channel state information (CSI) feedback, and spectral efficiency is also greatly improved. Simulation results show that, in mobile scenarios, RLA achieves at least 46% improvement over AMC and 19% improvement over SRA in terms of spectral efficiency.