Mitigation of Side-Effect Modulation in Optical OFDM VLC Systems

Side-effect modulation (SEM) has the potential to be a significant source of interference in future visible light communication (VLC) systems. SEM is a variation in the intensity of the light emitted by a luminaire and is usually a side-effect caused by the power supply used to drive the luminaires. For LED luminaires powered by a switched mode power supply, the SEM can be at much higher frequencies than that emitted by conventional incandescent or fluorescent lighting. It has been shown that the SEM caused by commercially available LED luminaires is often periodic and of low power. In this paper, we investigate the impact of typical forms of SEM on the performance of optical OFDM VLC systems; both ACO-OFDM and DCO-OFDM are considered. Our results show that even low levels of SEM power can significantly degrade the bit-error-rate performance. To solve this problem, an SEM mitigation scheme is described. The mitigation scheme is decision-directed and is based on estimating and subtracting the fundamental component of the SEM from the received signal. We describe two forms of the algorithm; one uses blind estimation while the other uses pilot-assisted estimation based on a training sequence. Decision errors, resulting in decision noise, limit the performance of the blind estimator even when estimation is based on very long signals. However, the pilot system can achieve more accurate estimations, thus better performance. Results are first presented for typical SEM waveforms for the case where the fundamental frequency of the SEM is known. The algorithms are then extended to include a frequency estimation step and the mitigation algorithm is shown also to be effective in this case

A new technique for reducing size of a wpt system using two-loop strongly-resonant inductors

Mid-range resonant coupling-based high efficient wireless power transfer (WPT) techniques have gained substantial research interest due to the number of potential applications in many industries. This paper presents a novel design of a resonant two-loop WPT technique including the design, fabrication and preliminary results of this proposal. This new design employs a compensation inductor which is combined with the transmitter and receiver loops in order to significantly scale down the size of the transmitter and receiver coils. This can improve the portability of the WPT transmitters in practical systems. Moreover, the benefits of the system enhancement are not only limited to the lessened magnitude of the TX & RX, simultaneously both the weight and the bill of materials are also minimised. The proposed system also demonstrates compatibility with the conventional electronic components such as capacitors hence the development of the TX & RX is simplified. The proposed system performance has been validated using the similarities between the experimental and simulation results. The power efficiency of the prototype circuit is found to be 93%, which is close to the efficiency reached by the conventional design. However, the weight of the transmitter and receiver inductors is now reduced by 78%, while the length of these inductors is reduced by 80%

A New Approach to Peak Threshold Estimation for Impulsive Noise Reduction Over Power Line Fading Channels

Impulsive noise (IN) is a major component that degrades signal integrity in power line communication (PLC) systems. PLC systems driven by orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) have Rayleigh distributed amplitudes. Based on the dynamic nature of each OFDM symbol, peak amplitude of the symbol was recently shown to be a suitable threshold for detecting IN, and this technique outperforms the conventional optimal blanking (COB) scheme. In this study, we improve the dynamic peak-based threshold estimation (DPTE) scheme that relies on the OFDM Rayleigh distributed amplitudes by converting the default Rayleigh distribution to uniform distribution to unveil IN with power levels below that of the conventional peak signal. Then, we perform nonlinear mitigation processing on the received signals, whose amplitudes exceed the uniformly distributed amplitude using blanking, a scheme we will refer to as uniformly distributed DPTE (U-DPTE). Our results (based on U-DPTE) significantly outperform the DPTE scheme by up to 4-dB gain in terms of output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Additionally and unlike earlier DPTE studies, we propose a novel threshold criterion that compensates the Gaussian noise power-level amplification (after equalization) for achieving the optimal SNR over a log-normal multipath fading channel. The results further reveal the suboptimality of the DPTE scheme over COB

Suppression of Mutual Interference in OFDM Based Overlay Systems

A promising appraoch for overcoming spectrum scarcity are overlay systems that share a frequency band with already existing licensed systems by using the spectral gaps left by the licensed systems. Due to its spectral efficiency and flexibility orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is an appropriate modulation technique for overlay systems. To enable a successful co-existence, techniques for suppressing mutual interferences between the overlay and the licensed system are proposed