Boosting data rate in dimming control for indoor visible light communication systems

Unipolar orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (U-OFDM) dimming control has been introduced for indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems, which demonstrates significant BER performance and power efficiency advantages over direct-current biased orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) at the expense of half the spectral efficiency. In this paper, Parallel Flip-OFDM (PF-OFDM) dimming control scheme is proposed which doubles the spectral efficiency of U-OFDM dimming control systems and achieves better dimming performance than DCO-OFDM dimming control systems. The simulation results show that the novel scheme has a good compromise performance of power efficiency, spectral efficiency and bit error rate in the mean time without sacrificing illumination quality.