Techniques for Enhancing the Performance of VLC 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.

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.

Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising and viable optical wireless communication (OWC) system that utilizes light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to achieve high data rates, energy efficiency, and resistance to electromagnetic interference (EMI). Direct-current biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) is a widely used scheme in VLC due to its high spectral efficiency. However, it suffers from significant challenges related to its elevated peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which causes nonlinear distortion and signal clipping due to LED limitations. To address this issue, this paper proposes a combination of Vandermonde-like matrix (VLM) precoding and nonlinear companding transform (NCT) techniques (specifically A-law and μ-law) over DCO-OFDM-based VLC. The VLM precoding minimizes the autocorrelation of the OFDM signal, hence reducing its PAPR, and NCT compresses the dynamic range of the signal. Simulation results indicated that the hybrid techniques achieved a PAPR reduction of around 3.5 dB (by 76 %); this is in the best case reduction compared to the conventional DCO-OFDM while maintaining an acceptable bit error rate (BER), moderately higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is required.

Visible light communication (VLC) system based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is promising for its ability to link a huge number of devices with high reliability and low latency. However, OFDM-based VLC systems are very sensitive to the symbol timing offsets. Thus, synchronisation algorithm is very important for OFDM-based VLC system. In this study, the authors first propose zero correlation code pair (ZCC pair) and investigate the periodical impulse-shaped correlation property of ZCC pair. Then the authors propose a novel timing offset estimation algorithm based on ZCC pair. The preamble is processed via peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction algorithms to overcome the PAPR problem in VLC systems. This algorithm achieves high accuracy and has low synchronisation error probability. The effectiveness of the authors' proposed algorithm has been demonstrated using computer simulation under non-light-of-sight VLC and Gaussian channels. The results show that the authors' algorithm outperforms the Schmidl Cox's and Park's algorithms in terms of synchronisation error probability and mean square error of timing error.

Visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as a green, low-cost, and secure supplement for existing radio frequency (RF) based systems. Although promising, the performance of VLC based systems is limited by several impairments, which degrade the achievable bit error-rate (BER) performance, viz. variations in channel-gain due to user-mobility, and channel-estimation error. Hence, in this letter, the bit error rate (BER) of maximal ratio combining is quantified over a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) VLC system, while considering the aforementioned impairments. Next, using the derived expressions, exact and asymptotic combiners based on the minimum bit error-rate (MBER) criterion are formulated for MIMO VLC systems impaired by user-mobility, and channel-estimation error. The accuracy of the contributed expressions for BER, and the performance of the proposed MBER combiner (MBERC) are corroborated by simulations performed over realistic MIMO VLC channels. Additionally, it is found that the proposed MBERC delivers improved BER performance in presence of channel-estimation error and user-mobility, which makes the proposed methodology viable.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) has been widely studied and adopted in visible-light communication (VLC) systems because of its high spectral efficiency and low-complexity implementation. However, OFDM-based VLC systems suffer from a high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), along with the nonlinear transfer characteristics of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). In this paper, a subcarrier grouping scheme for an OFDM-based VLC system is proposed. This scheme exploits the property that one LED lamp usually contains multiple independent LED chips. In the proposed scheme, all OFDM signal subcarriers are divided into groups, and each group is transmitted by an individual LED chip while the same receiver structure is maintained. The PAPR is reduced significantly because only some of the subcarriers are located on each LED chip. Hence, the achievable input power can be increased, leading to a higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and a lower bit error rate (BER). Simulated and experimental results demonstrate that the BER performance can be improved by over two orders of magnitude. Moreover, an adaptive switching mechanism is also proposed in this paper, in which a subcarrier grouping scheme is employed adaptively when the required input power is high. Simulation results validate that the proposed mechanism can enhance system robustness significantly.

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is the utmost widespread technology in wireless communications systems because of its orthogonality property, high spectral efficiency, and high data rates. It provides immunity to multipath fading and reduces Inter Symbol Interference (ISI). The tailback of OFDM is its high Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR), which distresses the dynamic range of HPA, introduces harmonics and large power back off required to minimize unsolicited harmonics. In this paper, an OFDM transceiver is implemented in LabVIEW with Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), such that system complexity is less and BER performance is good. To reduce the PAPR, companding techniques are well-thought-out which include Square Root Companding (SQRT), Logarithmic Rooting (LogR) and Tangential Rooting Companding (TanhR). The performance of these techniques is analyzed and observed that TanhR reduces PAPR to 1.15 dB without degrading BER. OFDM is used in many wireless standards, including the 4G LTE downlink transmissions, DVB-T, WLAN. OFDM is also one of the prominent competing Multi Carrier Modulation (MCM) schemes for considering even for 5G wireless communications systems.

Visible Light Communication (VLC) has emerged as a powerful technique for wireless communication systems. Providing high data rate and increasing capacity are the major problems in VLC. Recent evidence suggests that Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technique can offers improved data rates and increased link range. This paper describes the design and implementation of visible light communication system in indoor environment exploring the benefits of MIMO. The specific objective of this research was to implement a 4×4 Multiple Input (LEDs) Multiple Output (photodetectors)-VLC communication system, where a 16 white power LEDs in four arrays are setting up at transmitter and four RX modules are setting up at receiver side without the need for additional power or bandwidth as well as analyze a mathematical model for a VLC- 4×4 MIMO with different modes such as the suitable angles to cover the entire room. The research designs practically an electronic circuit for the transmitter and receiver with inexpensive components. The power distribution of different propagation modes is calculated for Single Input Single Output (SISO) and MIMO channels in typical room dimensions. The results in this paper indicate that the power is distributed uniformly for entire room when implemented VLC-MIMO as compared to VLC-SISO. Furthermore, a 4×4 MIMO implementing VLC is compared in term of BER vs. SINR with SISO communication system for both Line of Sight (LOS) and Non Line of Sight (NLOS) propagation modes. Comparing the two results of LOS and NLOS, it can be seen that a 4×4 MIMO implementing VLC for LOS perform better than the same system with NLOS due to decreasing in the received power resulted from the multipath effect.

OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) is usefully applied for DAB (digital audio broadcasting) and DVB (digital video broadcasting) systems due to its high spectral efficiency and robustness to ISI (intersymbol interference) and multipath fading. However, the OFDM signal has a large PAPR (peak-to-average power ratio), which results in significant nonlinear distortion when it passes through an HPA (high power amplifier) such as a TWTA (traveling wave tube amplifier) and a SSPA (solid state power amplifier). We propose a new PAPR reduction method using soft clipping and filtering. Unlike conventional hard clipping, soft clipping has non-zero slope in the clip region. Next, filtering, which uses additional FFT and IFFT processes, is applied in order to reject the out-of-band clip noise. Although the filtering removes the out-of-band noise, it oppositely increases PAPR by a small amount. Since an HPA increases the power consumption according to the linearity range, soft clipping for an SSPA lowers power consumption and is more efficient than the conventional hard clipping method. By the results of the proposed method, the wanted PAPR can be obtained and there is no out-of-band radiation caused by the clipping process.

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is typically a system used in encoding digital data. It has huge benefits among which primary are high spectral efficiency upon Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) and robustness. It also has some drawbacks, the main hitch in OFDM system is High Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR). In order to minimize PAPR, many techniques are available among which some common and efficient are Partial Transmit Sequence (PTS), Selected Mapping (SLM), Coding, Interleaving, Companding, Peak windowing, Peak reduction, Envelope Scaling. Every method has both edge and snag. The simplest is clipping. There are also some complex techniques like PTS, SLM. In this paper the proposed method is a hybrid combination of Repeated Frequency Domain Filtering and Clipping (RFDFC) and Absolute Exponential Companding (AEC). This method not only bring PAPR to 3.5 dB as compared to 10.5 dB in original, but is also easy to implement.

Any realistic indoor multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) visible light communication (VLC) system, besides providing reliable high rate transmission, should also support flicker-free, dimming capable, and uniform illumination. In this article, we propose a multi-level multi-pulse modulation for a MIMO VLC system to provide a high data rate with flicker-free uniform illumination. A low complexity detector and a searching algorithm to design the symbol set for transmission are also discussed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed detector can achieve a remarkable reduction in computational complexity without any performance degradation as compared with the conventional maximum likelihood detector. Moreover, the proposed symbols design algorithm can help to reduce the symbol error rate (SER), especially in high correlation MIMO VLC channels.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique is now used in most new broadband communication system, and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is also utilized within current 4^th generation (4G) of mobile telecommunication technology. With MIMO and OFDM combined, visible light communication (VLC) system’s diversity gain is increase, yet system capacity for dispersive channels is also enhanced. Moreover, with the emerging massive MIMO-OFDM VLC system, there are significant advantages than smaller systems’ such as channel hardening, further increasing of energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE) based on law of large number. This paper addresses one of the major technological challenges, system architecture design, which was solved by semispherical beehive structure (SBS) receiver and so that diversity gain can be identified and applied in Massive MIMO VLC system. Simulation results shows that the proposed design clearly presents a spatial diversity over conventional VLC systems.

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.

In this paper, we investigate and compare the performance of single- and multi-carrier modulation schemes for indoor visible light communication (VLC). Particularly, the performances of single carrier frequency domain equalization (SCFDE), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and on-off keying (OOK) with minimum mean square error equalization (MMSE) are analyzed in order to mitigate the effect of multipath distortion of the indoor optical channel where nonlinearity distortion of light emitting diode (LED) transfer function is taken into account. Our results indicate that SCFDE system, in contrast to OFDM system, does not suffer from high peak to average power ratio (PAPR) and can outperform OFDM and OOK systems. We further investigate the impact of LED bias point on the performance of OFDM systems and show that biasing LED with the optimum value can significantly enhance the performance of the system. Bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) is also considered for OFDM and SCFDE systems to further compensate signal degradation due to inter-symbol interference (ISI) and LED nonlinearity.

DC-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) has been proposed in visible light communication (VLC) to overcome the limited modulation bandwidth of light emitting diode (LED). Due to the implementation of the inverse fast Fourier transform at the DCO-OFDM transmitter, DCO-OFDM suffers from its high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which restricts its use in some VLC applications, especially where the optical power efficiency is a crucial requirement. That is because the LEDs used in VLC systems have a limited optical power-current linear range. To this end, a novel discrete Fourier transform spread-optical pulse amplitude modulation (DFTS-OPAM) signal scheme based on the single carrier-interleaved frequency division multiple access (SC-IFDMA) signal is introduced in this paper to address the high PAPR issue of OFDM. DFTS-OPAM is achieved by considering a PAM as an SC-IFDMA data symbol and duplicate the output vector of the fast Fourier transform at the SC-IFDMA transmitter side. Simulation results show that the PAPR of the proposed scheme is 7 dB lower than that of DCO-OFDM. Furthermore, this significant PAPR improvement is experimentally investigated where the practical results show that the proposed scheme can provide more 2.5 dB reduction in the average transmitted power requirement compared to DCO-OFDM and can subsequently increase the maximum achieved distance between the transmitter and the receiver up to 44%.