Efficient Flicker-Free FEC Codes using Knuth's Balancing Algorithm for VLC

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient flicker-free FEC coding scheme for VLC using polar codes and Knuth's balancing algorithm, achieving better error correction, higher transmission rates, and lower complexity without lookup tables.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel flicker-free FEC code construction for VLC that combines polar codes with Knuth's balancing algorithm, improving performance and efficiency.

Findings

Flicker-free codes achieved without lookup tables.

Error correction performance improved by 1.8 dB and 0.9 dB.

Higher transmission rates with lower complexity.

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) provides a short-range optical wireless communication through light-emitting diode (LED) lighting. Light beam flickering and dimming are among the challenges to be addressed in VLC. Conventional methods for generating flicker-free codes in VLC are based on run-length limited codes that have poor error correction performance, use lookup tables which are memory consuming, and have low transmission rates. In this paper, we propose an efficient construction of flicker-free forward error correction codes to tackle the issue of flickering in VLC. Our simulation results show that by using polar codes and at a dimming ratio of 50%, the proposed system generates flicker-free codes without using lookup tables, while having lower complexity and higher transmission rates than the standard VLC methods. For an information block length of 256, the error correction performance of the proposed scheme is $1.8$ dB and $0.9$ dB better than that of the regular schemes at the bit error rate of $10^{-6}$ for a rate of 0.44 and 0.23, respectively.