Performance comparison of MU-MIMO schemes for indoor visible light communication systems

The correlation of the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels in indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems are always very high, hence the traditional multi-user multi-stream (MUMS) based schemes do not always work very well. In order to cope with this problem, we introduce a new MIMO strategy for indoor VLC systems in which multiple users are scheduled simultaneously while individual users are allocated only one data stream. Two multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) schemes under this strategy are proposed, and compared with the traditional MUMS based scheme. The contrast results indicated that one of our proposed schemes has the minimum computational complexity, and the other proposed scheme has the best performance, which can be used as important references for the design of indoor VLC systems under different application scenarios.