Joint Constellation and Reflectance Optimization for Tunable Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided VLC Systems

The intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an emerging technology that can conquer visible light communication’s (VLC) dependency on the line-of-sight (LoS) channel by offering additional non-light-of-sight (NLoS) communication links. In this paper, a newly proposed electro-tunable intelligent reflecting metasurface is deployed in dimmable single-input single-output (SISO) VLC systems. We aim to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance by jointly optimizing the transmit constellation and the reflectance of the IRS units. To this end, the optimization problem can be solved in two steps. The minimum distance of the received constellation is firstly maximized by a convex problem, which guarantees the minimum BER. Then, the transmit constellation and the synchronously-tunable reflectance of the IRS units that correspond to the optimal received constellation are determined with an iterative alternate optimization algorithm. Finally, the simulation results show the BER performance improvement and the dimming relaxation benefit of the tunable IRS-aided SISO VLC systems.