A Semi-deterministic Approach for Clipping Noise Mitigation in DCO-OFDM Systems

High peak to average power ratio (PAPR) is a problem in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based communication systems. High PAPR introduces nonlinearity due to limited dynamic ranges of analog components. In case of visible light communication (VLC) it is more severe due to limited working range of light emitting diodes (LEDs). Clipping is often the simplest way to solve this problem. But it comes at a price of added clipping noise component to the signal. Clipping noise restricts the minimum attainable bit error rate (BER). A meta-data based semi-deterministic time domain approach is studied to reduce the clipping noise at the receiver. Simulation results show that clipping noise can be reduced with a simple algorithm compromising data rate by a small margin. The proposed algorithm can be applied without any restrictions on the OFDM parameters.