Experimental investigation on impacts of PAPR reduction schemes in OFDM-based VLC systems

In this paper, different PAPR reduction schemes for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based visible light communication (VLC) system are experimentally investigated. We show that PAPR reduction may not always result in performance improvement in VLC systems. Compared to the linear selective mapping (SLM) precoding scheme, the nonlinear companding schemes, albeit providing larger PAPR reduction, may result in worse bit error rate (BER) performance due to additional noise induced in its expanding process. Experimental results show that for the VLC system with severe frequency-selective fading, SLM scheme exhibits the best BER performance compared to the exponential and logarithmic companding schemes.