Mitigation of interference using OFDM in visible light communication

• Core Innovation & Objective • Developed a novel, integrated system architecture combining a modified USRP X310 software-defined radio platform with a custom-designed high-power LED optical transceiver. • Achieved high-speed, low-latency, and highly reliable audio-video transmission over Visible Light Communication (VLC) for intelligent transportation and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) applications, particularly in electromagnetically sensitive environments. • Key Technical Breakthroughs • LED Bandwidth Extension: Designed an innovative active pre-equalization circuit (based on a 4th-order high-pass RC bypass and op-amps) that dramatically increased the 3dB modulation bandwidth of a commercial 15W LED from 3 MHz to 120 MHz. • High-Speed Modulation: Successfully implemented 64QAM-OFDM modulation/demodulation using GNU Radio on the USRP, enabling spectrally efficient data transmission. • Advanced Optical Design: Custom-designed optical lenses (transmitter and receiver) and a high-power Bias-T circuit for efficient AC/DC coupling, ensuring the LED operates in its linear region and maximizing optical power transfer. • Stable Link Performance: Incorporated an Automatic Gain Control (AGC) circuit at the receiver, stabilizing the output voltage between 1.2V - 2.0V and maintaining a modulation signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) > 23 dB over varying distances. • Outstanding System Performance • The experimentally demonstrated performance metrics are exceptional for a VLC system: • Peak Data Rate: 500 Mbps • Communication Distance: 0 - 110 meters • Bit Error Rate (BER): As low as 1.74 × 10⁻⁵ (far below the 1 × 10⁻⁴ target) • End-to-End Latency: < 0.1 s • Beam Angle: 11.5° (Transmitter) • Field of View (FOV): ≤ 18° (Receiver) • System Integration and Design • Hardware-Software Co-Design: Seamless integration of the USRP X310 (handling digital baseband processing) with the custom analog optical front-end. • Compact and Practical: The system is designed for external mounting on vehicles, offering a practical solution for real-world deployment. • Simulation-Guided Design: Used LightTools for optical design and Optisystem for communication link simulation to validate the design before implementation. • Significance and Application Value • Solves Critical Challenges: Provides a high-speed, secure, and EMI-free communication alternative to traditional RF in environments like military operations, petroleum facilities, and intelligent transportation systems. • 6G Potential: Serves as a practical reference for the development of VLC as a complementary technology in 6G networks. • Demonstrates Feasibility: Successfully proves the viability of using commercial LEDs and USRP platforms for building high-performance, medium-to-long-range optical communication systems. • This work represents a significant step forward in practical high-speed VLC system design, combining theoretical innovation with robust engineering to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Existing vehicular VLC systems suffer from limited bandwidth, short transmission distances, low data rates, and support only a narrow range of communication services. To address these issues, this paper proposes a vehicle-mounted high-speed LED visible light communication (VLC) system based on Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). Leveraging 64QAM-OFDM digital modulation, an improved USRP X310 hardware platform, and a PC, we establish a novel architecture comprising digital baseband and optical transceiver modules. The baseband module eliminates traditional spectrum-shifting circuits and antennas, retaining only FPGA and ADC/DAC units. Audio/video files undergo 64QAM-OFDM modulation directly on the PC, with modulated signals output via DAC to a custom-designed wide-bandwidth LED transceiver. A broadband hardware equalization network based on a fourth-order RC bypass circuit was designed expands the 3dB bandwidth of high-power LEDs from 3 MHz to 120 MHz. Combined with automatic gain control (AGC), this achieves an optical transceiver with 12–15 W output power, >23 dB optical modulation signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and stable receiver output voltage (1.2–2.0 V). The resulting compact system delivers low latency, high data rates, and high reliability. Under aligned optical path conditions, the system achieves >1 Mbit/s at 110 m (BER 0.49 × 10⁻⁵, delay 0.009-0.05s) and a peak rate of 500 Mbit/s at 10 m (BER 7.4 × 10⁻⁵), with an 11.5° transmit angle and a receiver field of view (FOV) of less than 18°. This work demonstrates the feasibility of high-power LED-based 64QAM-OFDM communication using USRP X310 for medium- to long-range vehicular links, providing a reference for intelligent transportation systems.

In visible light communication (VLC) system, the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technique has been widely used to achieve a high data rate transmission. However, OFDM will cause high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) in the VLC system. In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a new interleaved Discrete Fourier Transform Spread Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (DFT-S OFDM) method. We compare the interleaved DFT-S technique to other PAPR reduction techniques, such as Clipping OFDM and conventional DFT-S. The experimental results show that interleaved DFT-S achieve FEC threshold for an overall 2.0Gb/s 32QAM signal over the 1.05m transmission. In addition, interleaved DFT-S presents significant PAPR reduction, low complexity and optimal BER performance, when compared to other techniques.

Since visible light communication (VLC) could support high-speed broadband transmission and be combined with existing illumination system, it is an optional technology for multimedia broadcasting, especially for indoor scenario. Further-more, hybrid modulation could be applied in VLC system to assist data transmission or expand new functions. Researches and experiments show that conventional on-off key (OOK) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) could be implemented successfully in VLC system respectively, thus it seems that a direct adding of OOK and OFDM signal is a feasible method for hybrid modulation. However, nonlinearity of electro-optical converting in VLC transmitter makes the relationship between transmission performance and amplitude of OOK or OFDM signal different from that in radio frequency (RF) system. In this paper, a mathematical model is built to analyze its performance and predict the bit error rate (BER) using OOK and OFDM signal amplitude in a given VLC system in order to find proper parameters for higher transmission quality. Simulation is also implemented to prove the validity and accuracy of the model.

In this paper, we propose and investigate an adaptively 84.44 to 190 Mb/s phosphor-LED visible light communication (VLC) system at a practical transmission distance. Here, we utilize the orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing quadrature-amplitude-modulation (OFDM-QAM) modulation with power/bit-loading algorithm in proposed VLC system. In the experiment, the optimal analogy pre-equalization design is also performed at LED-Tx side and no blue filter is used at the Rx side for extending the modulation bandwidth from 1 MHz to 30 MHz. In addition, the corresponding free space transmission lengths are between 75 cm and 2 m under various data rates of proposed VLC. And the measured bit error rates (BERs) of &lt; 3.8×10^-3 [forward error correction (FEC) limit] at different transmission lengths and measured data rates can be also obtained. Finally, we believe that our proposed scheme could be another alternative VLC implementation in practical distance, supporting &lt; 100 Mb/s, using commercially available LED and PD (without optical blue filtering) and compact size.

The exponential rise in wireless communication demands and allied applications have revitalized academia-industries to develop an efficient and potential solution. Furthermore, the high-pace increasing scarcity of radio spectrum has also alarmed researchers to achieve better Quality of Service (QoS) centric solution. To meet such demands Visible Light Communication (VLC) systems have gained global attention; however, up surging high rate, range and reliability (3R) needs demand better performance. Towards these goals, Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) based VLC systems is an efficient approach; though its efficacy under Multiple Users (MU) conditions remains least explored. Enabling MIMO-MU based VLC can achieve 3R objectives effectively; however, factors like multipath attenuation, interferences and varied impairment-affects makes classical approached confined. The MIMO-MU VLC systems require robust error, noise or interference resilient transmission even under adverse conditions such as non-linear LED, multipath attenuation and interference. Towards these objectives, in this paper a highly robust MIMO-MU VLC system is developed that incorporates an augmented MIMO channel design and combined pre-coding and post equalization schemes. To alleviate major interference probability in MIMO-MU environment, proposed model incorporates time (delay)-multiplexing based data transmission followed by signal adaptive precoding and Volterra Kernel based Hybrid-equalizer. This approach enables interference and noise removal as well as LED non-linearity handling under MIMO-MU VLC communication. The use of a Volterra Kernel based Decision Feedback Equalization with both linear as well as non-linear equalization enables proposed VLC system to exhibit low Bit Error Rate with low modulation index and taps, that optimizes trade-off between performance as well as complexity.

We propose a configuration of a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM)-visible light communication (VLC) system using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and an adaptive Nyquist windowing of the OFDM signal in the receiver. Based on this configuration, we demonstrate a 750-Mb/s WDM-VLC transmission based on RGB light-emitting diode (LED) with a distance of 70 cm. The measured bit error rate (BER) for all channels are under the pre-forward error correction limit of 3.8 \times 10-3. The BER performances of all the channels of the proposed WDM-VLC system show considerable improvement compared with those of the system without Nyquist windowing.

Visible light communication (VLC) is a technology that is currently being employed to achieve high data rates. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a powerful scheme for intensity modulation and direct detection (IM-DD) that is becoming increasingly important. OFDM systems based on VLC are accomplished through the implementation of IM-DD constraints, including direct current biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM), asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM), and asymmetrically clipped DC-biased (ADO-OFDM), among others. The OFDM technique based on VLC is inefficient in terms of spectral efficiency and has a high peak to average power ratio (PAPR). In this article, the symbol time compression-image adjust (STC-IMADJS) technique will be proposed for throughput maximization and PAPR reduction in the DCO-OFDM, ACO-OFDM, and ADO-OFDM systems. Furthermore, the STC technique enables the simultaneous transmission of two sub-carriers through Walsh spreading codes without inference between them. As a result, the OFDM symbol has been reduced by 50%. The IMADJS strategy reduces the high PAPR of transmitted signals by compressing large signals and expanding small signals, as long as the average power level remains constant after compression. Therefore, the proposed STC-IMADJS technique doubles the throughput as well as significantly reduces the PAPR for OFDM systems based on VLC. The simulation results are performed using Matlab-2021a for 1024 sub-carriers. As a result, the simulation results show that the proposed technique reduces the PAPR by 3.7 dB (86%), 8.16 dB (93%), and 1.81 dB (20%) for DCO-OFDM, ACO-OFDM, and ADO-OFDM systems respectively. Furthermore, the technique has a significantly lower computational complexity than conventional OFDM systems based on VLC. Finally, the measures of performance through this article are bit error rate and complementary cumulative distribution function.

In this letter, we propose an adaptive indoor multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) visible light communication (VLC) system using a receiver module with angular diversity. In order to improve the capacity of indoor MIMO-OFDM VLC systems, tilted receivers are utilized to increase channel diversity, thus reducing channel correlation. With the help of singular value decomposition-based technique, which decomposes the MIMO VLC channels into independent parallel sub-channels, adaptive resource allocation, namely, bit and power loading, is used for these sub-channels to further improve the proposed system’s capacity. Based on a $4\times 4$ indoor MIMO-OFDM VLC system, we investigate bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed adaptive system with different polar angles in two typical indoor scenarios. Numerical simulation results show that with 50-MHz modulation bandwidth, average BER can be improved from $4.97\times 10^{\mathrm {-3}}$ to $1.66\times 10^{\mathrm {-5}}$ and from $1.90\times 10^{\mathrm {-3}}$ to $1.59\times 10^{\mathrm {-6}}$ for the two scenarios, respectively.

This paper reports on findings on the analysis of the fast Fourier transform (FFT) hybrid power line communication (PLC) - visible light communication (VLC) system (PLC- VLC) based on ACO-OFDM in impulsive noise, when the perfect nulling technique is utilized to combat noise in the system. In this work, we develop theoretical expressions that describe the error floors realized in the system due to perfect nulling. Perfect nulling refers to a noise mitigation technique that perfectly identifies impulsive noise locations in a string of data samples and clips them to zero, leading to an error floor at a high Signal to Noise (SNR) ratio. Thus, the principal contribution of this paper is to analyze and derive theoretical Bit Error Rate (BER) expressions for the error floor achieved by a BPSK OFDM signal in the FFT hybrid PLC-VLC system based on asymmetrically clipped optical - orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM), in a channel corrupted with Added White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and impulsive noise. The derived theoretical BER results will be compared to the error floors obtained through simulations.

The enhanced proliferation of connected entities needs a deployment of innovative technologies for the next generation wireless networks. One of the critical concerns, however, is the spectrum scarcity, due to the unprecedented broadcast penetration rate nowadays. Based on this, visible light communication (VLC) has recently emerged as a viable solution to secure high-speed communications. VLC, a high data rate communication technology, has proven its stature as a promising complementary to its radio frequency (RF) counterpart. VLC is a cost-effective, energy-efficient, and secure technology that exploits the current infrastructure, specifically within indoor and underwater environments. Yet, despite their appealing capabilities, VLC systems face several limitations which constraint their potentials such as LED’s limited bandwidth, dimming, flickering, line-of-sight (LOS) requirement, impact of harsh weather conditions, noise, interference, shadowing, transceiver alignment, signal decoding complexity, and mobility issue. Consequently, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been considered an effective technique to circumvent these shortcomings. The NOMA scheme has emerged as a revolutionary paradigm to address the shortcomings of VLC systems. The potentials of NOMA are to increase the number of users, system’s capacity, massive connectivity, and enhance the spectrum and energy efficiency in future communication scenarios. Motivated by this, the presented study offers an overview of NOMA-based VLC systems. This article provides a broad scope of existing research activities of NOMA-based VLC systems. This article aims to provide firsthand knowledge of the prominence of NOMA and VLC and surveys several NOMA-enabled VLC systems. We briefly highlight the potential and capabilities of NOMA-based VLC systems. In addition, we outline the integration of such systems with several emerging technologies such as intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Furthermore, we focus on NOMA-based hybrid RF/VLC networks and discuss the role of machine learning (ML) tools and physical layer security (PLS) in this domain. In addition, this study also highlights diverse and significant technical hindrances prevailing in NOMA-based VLC systems. We highlight future research directions, along with provided insights that are envisioned to be helpful towards the effective practical deployment of such systems. In a nutshell, this review highlights the existing and ongoing research activities for NOMA-based VLC systems, which will provide sufficient guidelines for research communities working in this domain and it will pave the way for successful deployment of these systems.

In visible light communications (VLCs), adaptive Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems can adjust the transmission parameters according to channel estimation results to improve the system performance. Filtered-OFDM (F-OFDM) is a new flexible and adaptive technology based on OFDM systems and can further improve the system performance. In F-OFDM scheme, the out-of-band emission of OFDM signal is greatly inhibited by using the filter and the guard interval of the two subbands is reduced to save the spectrum resources. In this paper, we creatively apply the F-OFDM technology to visible light OFDM systems and derive the specific signal expression. Simulation results show that as the number of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) increases, the bit error rate (BER) performance of the F-OFDM system gets worse. Compared with asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and direct current biased OFDM (DCO-OFDM) in VLCs, F-OFDM has better BER performance in 4QAM, 16QAM, and 64QAM schemes.

Facing the current shortage of radio frequency spectrum resources, visible light communications (VLC) technology has been proposed to be a candidate technology in the sixth generation (6G), especially in the application of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). And the propagation characteristics of VLC channel are critical for VLC system design and optimization. Furthermore, the impact of weather conditions on VLC channel cannot be ignored considering the vehicular VLC in ITS. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the impact of different weather types including fog and relative humidity (RH) on VLC in a laboratory atmospheric chamber. To simulate adverse weather conditions, we change the levels of fog density and water vapor introduced into the chamber, respectively. Then we measure the power attenuation and the bit error rate (BER) performance of VLC system under fog and RH conditions. We find that the VLC system will exhibit worse BER performance in the fog impaired channel than RH conditions. Besides, the results show that the bit errors will not happen until the attenuation reaches the threshold, i.e. attenuated by about 60% for both fog and RH conditions in our experiments. After that, the BER will deteriorate badly even up to 20%.

Visible light communication (VLC) is considered a breakthrough wireless communication technology that has been proven capable of achieving very high data rates. This is a key advantage in indoor communication scenarios, since the vast majority of wireless traffic is witnessed in indoor communications. In every wireless system, the trade-off between achievable throughput, transmit signal power and corresponding error rate performance is largely dependent upon the considered modulation format. This is also the case in VLC systems, which are typically characterized by stringent performance requirements. Motivated by this, in the present contribution we introduce the space shift keying (SSK) modulation scheme in the context of non-orthogonal-multiple-access (NOMA) communications, which have been shown to be a performance enhancer of indoor based VLC systems. Based on this, all network users in the considered set up receive the same superimposed signal of all NOMA users, which is transmitted from the activated transmitters corresponding to the multiplexed SSK users information. Based on this and assuming a unique maximum likelihood detection, we quantity the system performance in terms of the corresponding bit error rate (BER) performance at each receiver. This analysis leads to the development of useful insights of theoretical and practical interest, which are expected to be useful in the effective design, implementation and deployment of SSK in NOMA based VLC systems.

Inter-symbol interference (ISI) in visible light communication (VLC) systems has been considered as a major problem that seriously deteriorates system performance. A series of equalization algorithms have been widely investigated and utilized to eliminate ISI and improve the system performance. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm called scalar modified cascaded multi-modulus algorithm (S-MCMMA) used in VLC system with PAM modulation. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate a red LED based PAM VLC system employing hardware pre-equalization technology and S-MCMMA equalization. A data rate of 525-Mbit/s for 8-PAM is successfully achieved in 1-m indoor free space transmission with the bit error rate (BER) below the 7 % forward error correction (FEC) limit of 3.8 × 10−3. Compared to the LMS equalization, the performance of S-MCMMA behaves quite similar (with a slight of advantage of S-MCMMA). However, the scheme is blind post-equalization without any training sequence aided thus higher bandwidth efficiency is achieved.

Encrypted image transmission in OFDM-based VLC systems using symbol scrambling and chaotic DFT precoding