PAPR Reduction in DCO-OFDM Based WDM VLC

Visible light communication (VLC) can achieve high data rate transmission with multicarrier modulation techniques. The common variant is direct current (DC) optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) which offers a spectral efficient modulation solution for VLC. However, similar to other multicarrier modulation schemes, DCO-OFDM suffers from a high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). In this paper, the efficacy of pilot-assisted (PA) PAPR reduction system in DCO-OFDM based VLC is demonstrated experimentally. Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is applied using three off-the-shelf light emitting diodes (LEDs). PA DCO-OFDM is compared to the conventional DCO-OFDM based on achievable data rate and bit error rate (BER). The available modulation bandwidth of each LED is utilised by adaptive bit and power loading in both systems. The proposed system reduces the high PAPR values of the system, hence, reduces the clipping noise and minimises the nonlinearity effect of each wavelength. Thus, the PA DCO-OFDM has achieved more than 7% data rate higher than that of the conventional DCO-OFDM with no PAPR reduction.