A generalized solution to the spectral efficiency loss in unipolar optical OFDM-based systems

The limited modulation bandwidth and nonlinearity of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are the important factors that constrain the high-speed transmission of visible light communication (VLC). As a LED lamp includes multiple LED chips and the superposition characteristics of light is approximately linear, a multi-LED optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system is proposed. The multiple LED chips are used to transmit multiple asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and unipolar OFDM (U-OFDM) signals in parallel, while the signals can be recovered at the receiver. When adopting the same M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM), its spectral efficiency is higher than the conventional ACO-OFDM system. The power of the multi-LED transmission system is split equally to each branch, and the amplitude range of the signal is smaller, thus it has better anti-nonlinearity performance. At last, its advantages are verified by the simulation comparisons with other optical OFDM systems.

A Comparative analysis of Asymmetrically clipped orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM), Flip orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (Flip-OFDM) and Unipolar orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (U-OFDM) for intensity modulation (IM) and direct detection (DD) indoor optical wireless communication (OWC) is presented. These techniques are differentiated based on the higher order modulated information symbols assigned to the subcarriers and conversion of real bipolar signal to non negative unipolar signal. In ACO higher order QAM symbols are assigned only to the odd subcarriers where as in Flip-OFDM and U-OFDM data is assigned to all the subcarriers. In ACO-OFDM bipolar signals are converted to unipolar by clipping the negative real time domain samples, in Flip-OFDM by separation of bipolar signals in to positive and negative frames and then flipping is incorporated where as in U-OFDM concept of representing each positive and negative time domain sample by a pair of samples is incorporated. Analytical approach is discussed and the implementation of these techniques is performed Performance of ACO-OFDM and Flip-OFDM is evaluated for various higher order modulation techniques in terms of bit error rate (BER) as a function of electrical energy per bit to noise ratio for additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. A comparative analysis of ACO, Flip and U-OFDM for 4-QAM is illustrated. It is observed that the BER performance is same but they vary in spectral efficiency, transmit power, bandwidth and clipping noise

A new precoding scheme for spectral efficient optical OFDM systems

This paper discusses about the effect of different modulation schemes on the coverage area of an indoor visible light communication. The idea of this research is based on the importance of using modulation techniques as needed. The main subject of this paper is power efficiency of each modulation referring to the coverage area. The modulation techniques used in this paper included On-Off keying Non return to zero (OOK-NRZ), On-Off Keying Return to Zero (OOK-RZ), Direct-current Biased Optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM), and Unipolar OFDM (U-OFDM). This paper presents the result of power efficiency, coverage area and Bit Error Rate performance of each modulation technique. The modulation technique producing the best performance in this paper was U-OFDM that had the highest power efficiency and the widest coverage area.

In this paper, the performance of direct current informative subcarrier intensity modulation (DCI-SIM) which is proposed to enhance the power efficiency of subcarrier intensity modulation (SIM) is investigated in visible light communication. The BER performance of DCI-SIM is compared with SIM, pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) and, enhanced unipolar orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (eU-OFDM) for different spectral efficiencies. Using analytical derivations and simulation results, we show that the DCI-SIM is the most power efficient modulation technique among others, and that the power efficiency increases with the spectral efficiency. Furthermore, we optimize the constellation of 64-DCI-SIM and present the results.

This paper discusses the issue of pulse shaping in unipolar orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing-based modulation schemes for intensity modulation/direct detection systems. Three previously presented schemes, asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM, pulse-amplitude-modulated discrete multitone modulation, and unipolar orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, are investigated. The current work demonstrates how both unipolar and bipolar pulse shapes can be used for the generation of unipolar continuous-time signals.

The energy efficiency of pulse-amplitude-modulated discrete multitone modulation (PAM-DMT) decreases as the modulation order of M-PAM modulation increases. Enhanced PAM-DMT (ePAM-DMT) was proposed as a solution to the reduced energy efficiency of PAM-DMT. This was achieved by allowing multiple streams of PAM-DMT to be superimposed and successively demodulated at the receiver side. In order to maintain a distortion-free unipolar ePAM-DMT system, the multiple time-domain PAM-DMT streams are required to be aligned. However, aligning the antisymmetry in ePAM-DMT is complex and results in efficiency losses. In this paper, a novel simplified method to apply the superposition modulation on M-PAM modulated discrete multitone (DMT) is introduced. Contrary to ePAM-DMT, the signal generation of the proposed system, termed augmented spectral efficiency discrete multitone (ASE-DMT), occurs in the frequency domain. This results in an improved spectral and energy efficiency. The analytical bit error rate (BER) performance bound of the proposed system is derived and compared with Monte-Carlo simulations. The system performance is shown to offer significant electrical and optical energy savings compared with ePAM-DMT and DC-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM).

This paper investigates optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (O-OFDM) systems with index modulation (IM) based on discrete Hartley transform (DHT) for visible light communications (VLC). An interesting trade-off between spectral efficiency (SE), energy efficiency, peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and bit error rate (BER) performance can be made by using the IM technique. And the DHT-based O-OFDM-IM systems can achieve higher SE compared with the DFT (discrete Fourier transform)-based counterparts. Employing DHT instead of DFT enables the removal of the Hermitian symmetry requirement, which contributes to transmitting more index bits and results in SE improvement. To acquire the same SE, the proposed systems can significantly lower the constellation order leading to better BER performance by contrast with the DFT-based counterparts. We employ DC (direct current) biasing and AC (Asymmetrically clipped) techniques to investigate the O-OFDM-IM systems in this paper. Simulation results indicate that SNR gains can be obtained by the DHT-based DCO/ACO-IM in comparison to the DFT-based counterparts. We also propose a novel reduced-complexity ML (maximum likelihood) detector specifically applicable to VLC. The new detector exhibits the same BER performance as the ML detector and performs better than the LLR (log-likelihood ratio) detector with reduced computational complexity.

We propose a point-to-point optical power allocation for the pulse amplitude modulated discrete multitone (PAM-DMT)-based hybrid optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (PHO-OFDM) system to enhance its bit error rate (BER) performance. As the power allocated to each branch of PHO-OFDM would lead to different BER performance, a joint derivation of the constellation combination and power spectral density of the noise is introduced and realized by the iterative approximation algorithm. Although the peak-to-averagepower ratio of PHO-OFDM increases slightly after the power allocation processing, the BER improvement can still be obtained on both the ideal and nonlinear transfer model of LED compared with the conventional PHO-OFDM under the same constellation combination.

In this paper, antisymmetry-constructed clipped optical OFDM (AC- OFDM) is proposed for intensity modulation with direct detection (IM/DD) systems, in which an antisymmetry property is imposed directly in time domain. AC-OFDM has the same spectral efficiency as traditional asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) but is less complex to implement. Layered AC-OFDM (LAC-OFDM) is then proposed as an extension to further improve spectral efficiency, where different layers of AC-OFDM signals are added in the time domain and transmitted simultaneously. Computational complexity analysis and numerical results show that LAC-OFDM has the same spectral efficiency as layered asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (LACO-OFDM) and enhanced unipolar OFDM (eU-OFDM) but is less complex in terms of both the number of real multiplications and real additions required. Specifically, LAC-OFDM requires less than half the multiplication and addition operations compared to the comparable LACO-OFDM scheme. Monte Carlo simulation results show that LAC- OFDM has the same bit error rate (BER) performance as LACO- and eU-OFDM.

In this paper, it is proposed to enhance coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system by using index modulation in terms of bit error rate (BER) and spectral efficiency for different levels of the fiber nonlinearity. In the coherent optical OFDM with index modulation system (CO-OFDM-IM), the information is conveyed not only through activated subcarriers but also by indices of the active subcarrier that are dynamically updated at the transmitted symbol rates. Unlike the conventional coherent optical OFDM (CO-OFDM) system, adjusting the number of the active subcarriers in the CO-OFDM-IM system provides improved BER performance and reduction the signal peak-to-average-ratios, when the fiber nonlinearity becomes significant. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed CO-OFDM-IM system has better BER performance when the proposed CO-OFDM-IM system and the CO-OFDM system have similar spectral efficiency. Also, the CO-OFDM-IM system can provide better spectral efficiency than the CO-OFDM system at the low-to-medium order modulation such as BPSK, QPSK, and 16QAM.

Hybrid PAPR reduction schemes for different OFDM-based VLC systems

In this paper, we study a novel optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme, fractional reversed polarity optical OFDM (FRPO- OFDM), which enables dimmable visible light communications. The scheme combines an asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) sequence with an information-carrying brightness control sequence (BCS). We show that the new scheme can create a wide range of brightness levels whilst transmitting extra information using the BCS to enhance the spectral efficiency. The detector which can recover information from both sequences is derived based on maximum likelihood (ML) detection and estimation. It is shown that the information carried by the BCS using variable on-off keying (VOOK) can be detected with extremely low bit error rate (BER) and that the resulting overall BER of FRPO-OFDM is constant over a wide dimming range.

High speed transmission systems (> 10 Gb/s) for cost-sensitive applications such as metropolitan network have attracted extensive interest due to the explosive data traffic growth in such applications. Optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based on direct modulation and direct detection for single-mode fiber (SMF) and multi-mode fiber (MMF) without optical amplification and chromatic dispersion (CD) compensation was proposed. Recent research has also shown that optical OFDM can be used with electronic dispersion compensation using direct detection in SMF. However, laser frequency chirp has been identified as a key limiting factor of capacity-versus-reach performance. In this paper, we present a novel concept of low cost optical OFDM with direct modulation of distributed feedback (DFB) lasers and coherent detection at 51.4 Gb/s and 64 QAM. A comprehensive theoretical model of the proposed system is developed. The proposed optical OFDM system concept and performance is based upon using electronic precompensation of laser frequency response, and electronic post compensation of DFB laser frequency chirp and CD. A numerical simulation of the transmission performance of the aforementioned system is conducted using different fiber lengths (40 km, 60 km, 120 km) and chirp parameters, which shows its attractiveness for access and metro applications.

In this paper, we propose a low-complexity peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction scheme that combines both multi-band (MB)-Hadamard precoding and clipping for the optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Approximations of PAPR distribution for baseband OFDM signals are analyzed and the effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the whole transmission link considering both the clipping and quantization noise are presented. After that, the MB-Hadamard precoding is adopted to compresses the peak signals, minimizing the contaminating influence of signal distortions in subsequent clipping operations. In addition, the received SNRs and bit error rate (BER) are calculated theoretically for each split sub-band. The 50-m step-index polymer optical fiber (POF) transmission is adopted as a special case to both evaluate the system performance and then compare the proposed scheme with other well-known PAPR reduction techniques. With this scheme, the PAPR is reduced effectively and the system’s BER performance is improved significantly. The results show that the proposed scheme with appropriate number of sub-bands precoding provides favorable trade-offs among PAPR reduction, power spectral density, transmission rate, BER, and computational complexity, which demonstrates its feasibility and validity.