Merging color shift keying and complementary pulse position modulation for visible light illumination and communication

The rising need of indoor broadband services without increasing the electromagnetic pollution has led the scientific community to look for smart spectrum usage. From this, it stems the need of emerging paradigm of visible light communications. In the context of the IEEE 802.15.7 Task Group activities, a new modulation format named color shift keying (CSK), based on sending signals spaced in the domain of the wavelength and able to both support the communication and the illumination of indoor environments, has been proposed. In this paper, we propose a transmission/reception scheme based on CSK modulation that also makes use of a modulation format that descends from the pulse position modulation by taking care of illumination level to be granted. The aim of this contribution is twofold: to propose the receiver architecture for that kind of transmission and to evaluate its performance by performing also comparisons with other contributions in the literature. The proposed scheme is robust with respect to optical interference and presents high rate and low bit error rate at the cost of a limited increasing of complexity of the receiver with respect to other approaches.