Visible-light communication (VLC) has several advantages over the commonly used radio frequency (RF) spectrum, including high bandwidth and low crosstalk. These features have become of more significance, especially as the proliferation of wireless devices increases and causes spectrum crowding. The white light in VLC systems is typically obtained from blue/violet light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and phosphors partially converting blue light into longer wavelength colors spanning the visible-light band. One phosphor that is frequently used is cerium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG). However, YAG suffers from a low color-rendering index (CRI) and high correlated color temperature (CCT). Lead halide perovskites provide an alternative to YAG and have been extensively utilized for optoelectronic devices owing to their tunable bandgap and high photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY). However, their drawbacks, e.g., lead toxicity and instability, hinder their widespread application. Herein, in order to take advantage of a high-performance lead-free tin-based halide perovskite phosphor that has a high absolute PLQY of near unity and a wide spectral emission ranging from 500 to 700 nm, we fabricated ultraviolet (UV) micro light-emitting diodes (micro-LEDs) with a peak wavelength at 365 nm to match the peak of the photoluminescence excitation (PLE) spectra of the material to obtain strong yellow-spectrum emission. Together with a blue LED, white light was obtained with a CRI of 84.9 and 4115-K CCT. Despite the long PL lifetime of the perovskite material, which is in the order of μs, a net data rate of 1.5 Mb/s was achieved using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) with adaptive bit and power loading to take advantage of the exceptionally high PLQY of the phosphor to improve the data throughput of the VLC system using higher modulation orders. Furthermore, through improvements to the nanostructure of lead-free tin-based halide perovskite phosphor and the use of excitation sources with a higher power, the data rate is expected to be even higher. The lead-free nature of this material, along with its wide spectrum and high conversion efficiency, makes it a promising alternative to conventional toxic perovskite-based phosphors. As the first demonstration of VLC links using lead-free perovskite, this study paves the way for safer, more sustainable VLC systems.

L'objectif de cette thèse CIFRE est de contribuer à la communication véhiculaire autonome et au développement de la mobilité urbaine. Les travaux sont basés sur les limitations et défis de la communication par radio pour les applications de sécurité et envisagent de déployer le système d'éclairage des véhicules en tant que solution de communication de soutien pour le platooning d'IVC-activées par VC Véhicules autonomes. L'objectif principale de cette recherche doctorale consiste à intégrer le système VLC dans l'architecture existante de C-ITS en développant un prototype VLC, ainsi que des algorithmes de transfert suffisants permettant VLC, RF et des solutions basées sur la perception afin d'assurer les exigences de sécurité maximales et l'échange continu d'informations entre les véhicules. La faisabilité et l'efficacité de la mise en oeuvre du système et des algorithmes de transfert ont fait l'objet de recherches approfondies sur six chapitres, destinés à faciliter une progression logique des matériaux et permettre un accès relativement facile. En plus de l'amélioration de la capacité routière en utilisant les systèmes de conduite autonome à la base de convoi. Les simulations réalisées ainsi que les résultats expérimentaux ont montré que l'intégration de VLC avec les solutions existantes RF a un avantage certain dans la qualité du canal de communication et les exigences de sécurité d'un système de platooning quand un algorithme approprié est utilisé. / This thesis effort contributes to the autonomous vehicular communication and urban mobility improvements. The work addresses the main radio-based V2V communication limitations and challenges for ITS hard-safety applications and intends to deploy the vehicular lighting system as a supportive communication solution for platooning of IVC-enabled autonomous vehicles. The ultimate objectives of this Ph.D research are to integrate the VLC system within the existing C-ITS architecture by developing a VLC prototype, together with sufficient, hand-over algorithms enabling VLC, RF, and perception-based solutions in order to ensure the maximum safety requirements and the continuous information exchange between vehicles. The feasibility and efficiency of the VLC-RF system implementation and hand-over algorithms were subjects to deep investigations over six self-contained chapters meant to facilitate a logical progression of materials and to enable a relatively easy access. In addition to the improvement in road capacity by utilizing the convoy-based autonomous driving systems. The carried out simulations followed-up by experimental results proved that the integration of VLC with the existed RF solutions lead to a definite benefit in the communication channel quality and safety requirements of a platooning system when a proper hand-over algorithm is utilized.

Efficient multimedia communication over mobile or wireless channels remains a challenging problem. To deal with that problem so far, the industry has followed mostly a divide and conquer approach, by considering separately the source of data (text, image, video, etc.) and the communication channel (electromagnetic waves across the air, a telephone line, a coaxial cable, etc.). The goal is always the same: to transmit (or store) more data reliably per unit of time, of energy, of physical medium, etc. With today's applications, the divide and conquer approach has, in a sense, started to show its limits. Let us consider, for example, the digital transmission of an image. At the transmitter, the first main step is data compression, at the source level. The number of bits that are necessary to represent the image with a given level of quality is reduced, usually by removing details in the image that are invisible (or less visible) to the human eye. The second main step is data protection, at the channel level. The transmission is made ideally resistant to deteriorations caused by the channel, by implementing techniques such as time/frequency/space expansions. In a sense, the two steps are quite antagonistic --- we first compress then expand the original signal --- and have different goals --- compression enables to transfer more data per unit of time/energy/medium while protection enables to transfer data reliably. At the receiver, the "reversed" operations are implemented. This separation in two steps dates back to Shannon's source and channel coding separation theorem in 1948 and has encouraged the division of the research community in two groups, one focusing on data compression, the other on data protection. This separation has also seduced the industry for the design, thereby supported by theory, of layered communication protocols. But this theorem holds only under asymptotic conditions that are rarely satisfied with today's multimedia content and mobile channels. Therefore, it is usually wise in practice to drop this strict separation and to allow at least some cross-layer cooperation between the source and channel layers. This is what lies behind the words joint source-channel techniques. As the name suggests, these techniques are optimized jointly, without a strict separation. Intuitively, since the optimization is less constrained from a mathematical standpoint, the solution can only be better or equivalent. In this thesis, we investigate a promising subset of these techniques, based on the turbo principle and on variable length codes. The potential of this subset has been illustrated for the first time in 2000, with an example that, since then, has been successfully improved in several directions. Unfortunately, most decoding algorithms have been so far developed on an ad hoc basis, without a unified view and often without specifying the approximations made. Besides, most code-related conclusions are based on simulations or on extrinsic information analysis. A theoretical framework on the error correcting properties of variable length codes in turbo systems is lacking. The purpose of this work, in three parts, is to fill in these gaps up to a certain extent. The first part presents the literature in this field and attempts to give a unified overview. The second part proposes a transmission system that generalizes previous systems from the literature, with the simple addition of a repetition code. While most previous systems are designed for bit streams with a high level of residual redundancy, the proposed system has the interesting flexibility to handle easily different levels of redundancy. Its performance is then analyzed for small levels of redundancy, which is a case not tackled extensively in the literature. This analysis leads notably to the discovery of surprising interleaving gains with reversible variable length codes. The third part develops the mathematical framework that was motivated during the second part but skipped on purpose for the sake of clarity. We first clarify several issues that arise with non-uniform bits and the extrinsic information charts, and propose and discuss two methods to compute these charts. Next, several theoretical results are stated on the robustness of variable length codes concatenated with linear error correcting codes. Notably, an approximate average distance spectrum of the concatenated code is rigorously developed. Together with the union bound, this spectrum provides upper bounds on the symbol and frame/packet error rates. These bounds are then analyzed from an interleaving gain standpoint and it is proved that the variable length code improves the interleaving gain if its spectrum is bounded.

The exponentially increasing demand for high-speed wireless communications will no longer be satisfied by the traditional radio frequency (RF) in the near future due to its limited spectrum and overutilization. To resolve this imminent issue, industrial and research communities have been looking into alternative technologies for communication. Among them, visible light communication (VLC) has attracted much attention because it utilizes the unlicensed, free and safe spectrum, whose bandwidth is thousand times larger than the entire RF spectrum. Moreover, VLC can be integrated into existing lighting systems to offer a dual-purpose, cost-effective and energy-efficient solution for next-generation small-cell networks (SCNs), giving birth to the concept of optical attocell networks. Most relevant works in the literature rely on system simulations to quantify the performance of attocell networks, which suffer from high computational complexity and provide limited insights about the network. Mathematical tools, on the other hand, are more tractable and scalable and are shown to closely approximate practical systems. The presented work utilizes stochastic geometry for downlink evaluation of optical attocell networks, where the co-channel interference (CCI) surpasses noise and becomes the limiting factor of the link throughput. By studying the moment generating function (MGF) of the aggregate interference, a theoretical framework for modeling the distribution of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is presented, which allows important performance metrics such as the coverage probability and link throughput to be derived. Depending on the source of interference, CCI can be classified into two categories: inter-cell interference (ICI) and intra-cell interference. In this work, both types of interference are characterized, based on which effective interference mitigation techniques such as the coordinated multipoint (CoMP), power-domain multiplexing and successive interference cancellation (SIC) are devised. The proposed mathematical framework is applicable to attocell networks with and without such interference mitigation techniques. Compared to RF networks, optical attocell networks are inherently more secure in the physical layer because visible light does not penetrate through opaque walls. This work analytically quantifies the physical-layer security of attocell networks from an information-theoretic point of view. Secrecy enhancement techniques such as AP cooperation and eavesdropper-free protected zones are also discussed. It is shown that compared to AP cooperation, implementing secrecy protected zones is more effective and it can contribute significantly to the network security.

Disertační práce se zabývá optickým digitálně-analogovým převodníkem, jako alternativou optické části koncové vysílací jednotky (optický front-end) určené pro VLC (visible light communication) aplikace. Stěžejní část práce, která se věnuje numerickému modelování optického kanálu, prezentuje vliv bitové hloubky, topologie koncové části optického vysílače a geometrického uspořádání na přenášený signál. Součástí práce je návrh, realizace a ověření parametrů optického digitálně-analogového převodníku vycházející z předcházejících simulací. V poslední řadě práce obsahuje demonstraci vysokorychlostní optické komunikace s využitím navrženého VLC optického vysílače.

This work is focused on free space optical communication in visible electromagnetic spectrum known as visible light communication (VLC). Basic parameters of standard IEEE 802.15.7, advantages and disadvantages are discussed in the theoretical part of this work. Furthermore, optical link and it´s parts are described. The largest part of the work is focused on design and simulation of optical receiver for visible spectrum. Selection of component, noise and SNR calculation is discussed as well. This work also includes calculation of power energy in different parts of optical connection, PCB design of optical receiver, transmitters and power supply and output board. Behavior and parameters of electronic circuits, components and optical connection are explored, measured and compared with theoretical values.

Radio frequency (RF) spectrum congestion motivates the search for alternative communication techniques to complement radio systems. Visible light communications (VLC) is an emerging technology that exploits the recent and ever-growing increase in the usage of energy-efficient light emitting diodes (LEDs) to imperceptibly modulate the optical power output of LEDs to enable communication and augment RF networks. Orthogonal frequency-divison multiplexing (OFDM) has been proposed as a modulation scheme for VLC due to its high spectral efficiency, ease of channel estimation and equalization, resistance to inter-symbol interference (ISI) and frequency-selective fading, efficient implementation using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and compatibility with RF and power-line communication (PLC) standards that use OFDM. One of the major drawbacks of conventional OFDM techniques is the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of OFDM signals. The peaks of the OFDM signals are clipped due to the limited dynamic range of the LED, which translates the high PAPR of the OFDM signal into non-linear distortion (NLD). This signal distortion causes bit-error rate (BER) performance degradation, especially at high optical signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) typical of indoor VLC scenarios. In this thesis, a new family of modulation techniques, termed spatial optical OFDM (SO-OFDM), is proposed with the aim of reducing the PAPR of conventional DC-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) by making use of the large number of LEDs typically available in indoor lighting settings. Each LED group signal is a narrowband signal consisting of a small number of subcarriers, and thus has a smaller PAPR than the original OFDM signal. Firstly, SO-OFDM is introduced and its two key concepts of frequency-to-space mapping and spatial summing are explained. Frequency-to-space mapping is achieved by allocating a subset of OFDM subcarriers to each LED. Each LED group signal is a narrowband signal consisting of a small number of subcarriers, and thus has a smaller PAPR than the original OFDM signal. Several design variations of the subcarrier assignment to LEDs are introduced and are shown through simulations, to reduce PAPR, and NLD noise due to clipping, and improve the BER performance at high SNRs as compared to DCO-OFDM. In addition, luminous efficacy is identified as an important lighting design parameter that is impacted by modulation. Relative luminous efficacy is defined as the ratio of the luminous efficacy of a modulated LED to that of an LED driven by a DC signal, and is introduced as a metric to assess the impact of modulation on LED lighting. Relative luminous efficacy links communication parameters such as signal variance to lighting design requirements. Secondly, a low-complexity amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme is proposed for an integrated power-line communication/visible-light communication (PLC/VLC) where SO-OFDM is used for the VLC link. Frequency translation of the incoming PLC signal is used to increase the usable bandwidth of the LED. The use of both frequency translation and SO-OFDM leads to capacity gains over DCO-OFDM in the high SNR regime. Finally, a low-complexity variant of SO-OFDM, termed square-wave SO-OFDM (SW-SO-OFDM), is proposed. Square-wave SO-OFDM uses square-wave carriers instead of sinusoidal waves to modulate a single OFDM subcarrier signal per LED. By using square-wave carriers, SW-SO-OFDM eliminates the need for digital-to-analog converters (DACs), digital predistortion (DPD), and the FFT operation. Squarewave SO-OFDM is also shown, through simulations, to achieve BER performance gains over SO-OFDM and DCO-OFDM. In addition, an experimental demonstration of SW-SO-OFDM with 64 QAM modulation on subcarriers is described. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Visible-light communications (VLC) is an emerging technology that exploits the increasingly widespread use of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for indoor lighting, and modulates the optical power output of the LED for data transmission. Among the various modulation techniques that have been proposed for VLC, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) offers high data rates, resistance to channel impairments, and simple channel estimation and equalization. However, OFDM signals suffer from a high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) which degrades the efficiency of the power amplifier in the transmitter and hinders the communication performance. In this thesis, a new multiple-LED modulation technique, termed spatial optical OFDM (SO-OFDM), is proposed to reduce the PAPR. Using a frequency-to-space mapping, SO-OFDM divides the wideband high-PAPR OFDM signal into multiple narrowband low-PAPR signals and assigns each signal to a group of LEDs. Spatial summing of the transmitted signals occurs at the receiver allowing for the use of a conventional OFDM receiver. Several variations of SO-OFDM are introduced and are shown, using simulations, to reduce the PAPR, combat non-linear distortion (NLD), and improve the bit-error rate (BER) performance at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), typical of VLC systems. Spatial optical OFDM is also applied to a practical scenario where its PAPR reduction capability is used to improve the overall capacity of a proposed system that integrates power-line communication (PLC) and VLC. A low-complexity variant of SO-OFDM, that uses square-wave carriers and simplifies the transmitter design by eliminating the need for digital predistortion (DPD) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) is also proposed, and tested experimentally.

This thesis explores the use of single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) for visible light communications (VLC). The high sensitivity of SPADs can potentially enhance the performance of VLC receivers. However, a SPAD-based system has challenges that need to be addressed before it can be considered as a viable option for VLC. The first challenge is the susceptibility of SPAD-based receivers to variations in ambient light. The high sensitivity of SPADs is advantageous for signal detection, but also makes SPADs vulnerable to variations in ambient light. In this thesis, the performance of a SPAD-based receiver is investigated under changing lighting conditions. Analytical expressions to quantify performance are derived, and an experiment is conducted to gain further understanding of system performance. It is shown that a SPAD-based receiver is highly sensitive to illumination changes when on-off keying (OOK) is employed, and that pulse-position modulation (PPM) is a preferred modulation scheme as it is more robust. The second challenge is broadcasting to SPAD-based receivers with different capabilities. A traditional broadcasting scheme is time-sharing, whereby a transmitter sends data to receivers in an alternating manner. Broadcasting to SPAD-based receivers is challenging as receivers may have diverse capabilities. In this thesis, a new multiresolution modulation scheme is proposed, which can potentially improve system performance over the traditional timesharing approach. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed, and a proof-of-concept experiment is performed to demonstrate its viability.

Technology for wireless information access has enabled innovation of 'smart' portable consumer devices. These have been widely adopted and have become an integral part of our daily lives. They need ubiquitous connectivity to the internet to provide value added services, maximize their functionality and create a smarter world to live in. Cisco's visual networking index currently predicts wireless data consumption to increase by 61% per year. This will put additional stress on the already stressed wireless access network infrastructure creating a phenomenon called 'spectrum crunch'. At the same time, the solid state devices industry has made remarkable advances in energy efficient light-emitting-diodes (LED). The lighting industry is rapidly adopting LEDs to provide illumination in indoor spaces. Lighting fixtures are positioned to support human activities and thus are well located to act as wireless access points. The visible spectrum (380 nm - 780 nm) is yet unregulated and untapped for wireless access. This provides unique opportunity to upgrade existing lighting infrastructure and create a dense grid of small cells by using this additional 'optical' wireless bandwidth. Under the above model, lighting fixtures will service dual missions of illumination and access points for optical wireless communication (OWC). This dissertation investigates multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) optical wireless broadcast system under unique constraints imposed by the optical channel and illumination requirements. Sample indexed spatial orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (SIS-OFDM) and metameric modulation (MM) are proposed to achieve higher spectral efficiency by exploiting dimensions of space and color respectively in addition to time and frequency. SIS-OFDM can provide significant additional spectral efficiency of up to (Nsc/2 - 1) x k bits/sym where Nsc is total number of subcarriers and k is number of bits per underlying spatial modulation symbol. MM always generates the true requested illumination color and has the potential to provide better color rendering by incorporating multiple LEDs. A normalization framework is then developed to analyze performance of optical MIMO imaging systems. Performance improvements of up to 45 dB for optical systems have been achieved by decorrelating spatially separate links by incorporating an imaging receiver. The dissertation also studies the impact of visual perception on performance of color shift keying as specified in IEEE 802.15.7 standard. It shows that non-linearity for a practical system can have a performance penalty of up to 15 dB when compared to the simplified linear system abstraction as proposed in the standard. Luminous-signal-to-noise ratio, a novel metric is introduced to compare performance of optical modulation techniques operating at same illumination intensity. The dissertation then introduces singular value decomposition based OWC system architecture to incorporate illumination constraints independent of communication constraints in a MIMO system. It then studies design paradigm for a multi-colored wavelength division multiplexed indoor OWC system.

<p>To achieve greater compression ratios new video and image CODECs like H.264 and JPEG 2000 take advantage of Context adaptive binary arithmetic coding. As it contains computationally heavy algorithms, fast implementations have to be made when they are performed on large amount of data such as compressing high resolution formats like HDTV. This document describes how entropy coding works in general with a focus on arithmetic coding and CABAC. Furthermore the document dicusses the demands of the different CABACs and propose different options to hardware and instruction level optimisation. Testing and benchmarking of these implementations are done to ease evaluation. The main contribution of the thesis is parallelising and unifying the CABACs which is discussed and partly implemented. The result of the ILA is improved program flow through a specialised branching operations. The result of the DHA is a two bit parallel accelerator with hardware sharing between JPEG 2000 and H.264 encoder with limited decoding support.</p>