OFDM Systems for Optical Communication with Intensity Modulation and Direct Detection

Intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) is a cost-effective optical communication strategy which finds wide applications in fiber communication, free-space optical communication, and indoor visible light communication. In IM/DD, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), originally employed in radio frequency communication, is considered as a strong candidate solution to combat with channel distortions. In this research, we investigate various potential OFDM forms that are suitable for IM/DD channel. We will elaborate the design principles of different OFDM transmitters and investigate different types of receivers including the proposed iterative receiver. In addition, we will analyze the spectral efficiency and decoding complexities of different OFDM systems to give a whole picture of their performance. Finally, simulation results are given to assess the detection performance of different receivers

A novel unipolar transmission scheme for visible light communication

This paper proposes a novel unipolar transceiver for visible light communication (VLC) by using orthogonal waveforms. The main advantage of our proposed scheme over most of the existing unipolar schemes in the literature is that the polarity of the real-valued orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) sample determines the pulse shape of the continuous-time signal and thus, the unipolar conversion is performed directly in the analog instead of the digital domain. Therefore, our proposed scheme does not require any direct current (DC) biasing or clipping as it is the case with existing schemes in the literature. The bit error rate (BER) performance of our proposed scheme is analytically derived and its accuracy is verified by using Matlab simulations. Simulation results also substantiate the potential performance gains of our proposed scheme against the state-of-the-art OFDM-based systems in VLC; it indicates that the absence of DC shift and clipping in our scheme supports more reliable communication and outperforms the asymmetrically clipped optical-OFDM (ACO-OFDM), DC optical-OFDM (DCO-OFDM) and unipolar-OFDM (U-OFDM) schemes. For instance, our scheme outperforms ACO-OFDM by at least 3 dB (in terms of signal to noise ratio) at a target BER of 10 −4 , when considering the same spectral efficiency for both schemes

Index Modulation-Aided OFDM for Visible Light Communications

Index modulation-aided orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing(IM-OFDM) is a promising modulation technique to achieve high spectral and energy efficiency. In this chapter, the conventional optical OFDM schemes are firstly reviewed, followed by the principles of IM-OFDM. The application of IM-OFDM in visible light communication (VLC) systems is introduced, and its performance is compared with conventional optical OFDM, which verifies its superiority. Finally, the challenges and opportunities of IM-OFDM are discussed for the VLC applications

A novel OFDM format and a machine learning based dimming control for lifi

This paper proposes a new hybrid orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) form termed as DC‐biased pulse amplitude modulated optical OFDM (DPO‐OFDM) by combining the ideas of the existing DC‐biased optical OFDM (DCO‐OFDM) and pulse amplitude modulated discrete multitone (PAM‐DMT). The analysis indicates that the required DC‐bias for DPO‐OFDM-based light fidelity (LiFi) depends on the dimming level and the components of the DPO‐OFDM. The bit error rate (BER) performance and dimming flexibility of the DPO‐OFDM and existing OFDM schemes are evaluated using MATLAB tools. The results show that the proposed DPO‐OFDM is power efficient and has a wide dimming range. Furthermore, a switching algorithm is introduced for LiFi, where the individual components of the hybrid OFDM are switched according to a target dimming level. Next, machine learning algorithms are used for the first time to find the appropriate proportions of the hybrid OFDM components. It is shown that polynomial regression of degree 4 can reliably predict the constellation size of the DCO‐OFDM component of DPO‐OFDM for a given constellation size of PAM‐DMT. With the component switching and the machine learning algorithms, DPO‐OFDM‐based LiFi is power efficient at a wide dimming range. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Dimmable visible light communications based on multilayer ACO-OFDM

This paper proposes a dimmable scheme for a visible light communication (VLC) system based on multilayer asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM), which is able to support a wide dimming range for different illumination requirements. In the proposed scheme, multiple layers of ACO-OFDM occupying different subcarriers are combined so that almost all of the subcarriers can be used for data transmission. The polarities of different layers of ACO-OFDM are varied to obtain flexible time-domain waveform, which can fully exploit the dynamic range of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and achieve better performance. The scaling factor and modulation order for each layer, as well as the dc bias, are optimized for different dimming requirements to achieve improved spectral efficiency. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can support communication over a wide dimming range and achieve higher spectral efficiency, compared with existing methods under different dimming requirements

Unlocking Spectral Efficiency in Intensity Modulation and Direct Detection Systems

A number of inherently unipolar orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation schemes have been introduced recently in an attempt to improve the energy efficiency of OFDM-based intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) systems. All such algorithms, including asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM), pulse-amplitude-modulated discrete multitone modulation (PAM-DMT) and unipolar orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (U-OFDM), experience an inherent loss in spectral efficiency caused by the restrictions imposed on the OFDM frame structure required for the generation of a unipolar signal. The current paper presents a modified modulation approach, termed enhanced U-OFDM (eU-OFDM), which compensates the spectral efficiency loss in U-OFDM. At the same time, it still allows for the generation of an inherently unipolar modulation signal that achieves better performance in terms of both electrical power and optical power dissipation compared to the conventional state-of-the-art technique direct current (DC)-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM). To the best of the authors' knowledge, the current work also presents the first experimental proof-of-concept demonstration of both U-OFDM and eU-OFDM, and clearly demonstrates the significant energy advantages that these two schemes can introduce in an optical wireless communications (OWC) system