Study of high-order non-equal probability QAM for visible light communication systems

In this Letter, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a high-order non-equal probability quadrature amplitude modulation (NEP-QAM) scheme for visible light communication (VLC) systems, where NEP-72QAM is considered as an example. Nonlinear coding is introduced to generate the NEP-18QAM signal in the first quadrant, which is then jointly mapped with the other two bits to obtain the four-quadrant symmetric NEP-72QAM signal. Moreover, a bit-to-symbol labeling scheme is proposed to achieve thorough Gray mapping. The experimental results show that the NEP-72QAM scheme achieves better performance than the traditional 64QAM scheme regardless of whether the light-emitting diode (LED) operates in the linear or nonlinear range. Compared with the probabilistically shaped 72QAM scheme, the available range of the driving peak-to-peak voltage of the NEP-72QAM scheme is only reduced by 20 mV when 0.92 is used as the normalized generalized mutual information threshold, but the complexity is much lower.