Channel capacity of the distributed MIMO relay in visible light communication systems

Visible light communication (VLC) is a novel paradigm that uses light-emitting diode (LED) light as an information carrier and has several advantages over radio-frequency communication in terms of the bandwidth, security and multi-path fading. When the VLC system is considered in an indoor environment, LED lamps, which are placed at the ceiling to provide ambient light, can offer rich spatial resources for VLC as distributed intermediate relaying terminals. This paper introduces a novel distributed multiple-input multiple-output (D-MIMO)-relaying VLC scheme and analyzes its communication performance. Using the sum rate of the broadcasting and multiple access relay channels, a tight upper bound on the channel capacity was derived. The numerical results showed that the D-MIMO-relaying VLC scheme outperformed the direct-path-based scheme in terms of the channel capacity. For a given indoor environment, the capacity of D-MIMO-relaying VLC can be improved further by selecting the appropriate relay parameters, such as the number of LED–PD pairs in a relay, distance between relays and height of relays.