High-speed power-efficient indoor wireless infrared communication using code combining-Part I

While use of power-efficient signaling schemes appears to be effective at compensating for the inherent high path-loss associated with pure diffuse infrared links, it begins to lose its effectiveness as the data rate is increased. At very high data rates, intersymbol interference (ISI) can result in a very high and sometimes irreducible power penalty, preventing the system from operating at a low bit-error probability. In this paper, we use a link design employing a multibeam transmitter in conjunction with a narrow field-of-view (FOV) direction diversity receiver. The design goal is to eliminate the effect of ISI so that power-efficient signaling schemes such as pulse-position modulation (PPM) can be employed at very high data rates. We also use high-rate Reed-Solomon codes to further increase the power efficiency of PPM signals. The proposed system can be made rate-adaptive through varying modulation level L and/or code rate R without increasing the complexity significantly. This provides a dynamic range large enough to allow efficient utilization of available bandwidth, i.e., to allow portable terminals to communicate at their highest permitted data rate, without sacrificing the quality of service. It is shown that a bit error rate not exceeding 10^-9 can be achieved within the link coverage area with 99% probability at bit rates up to a few hundreds of megabits per second, using transmitted power levels well below 1 W.