System design and performance analysis of asymmetrically and symmetrically clipped optical (ASCO)-OFDM for IM/DD optical wireless communications

As the quantity of mobile communication devices, such as cellphones, tablets, and laptops, dramatically increase, the demand for high speed wireless service has been growing. Optical wireless communications (OWCs), which offer unlimited transmission bandwidth, have received a lot of attention and been studied in recent decades. They can be an effective alternative to radio frequency communications (RFCs) for indoor high speed data transmission. Intensity modulation direct detection (IM/DD) is a simple way to realize the transmission of optical wireless signals in an indoor environment. Information data streams are modulated into the intensity of optical carriers and transmitted by light emitting diodes (LEDs). At the receiver, the instantaneous power of optical signals can be directly detected by photodiodes. Multipath distortion, especially in an indoor environment, caused by reflection from walls or furniture, severely affects the transmission quality of optical signals. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising modulation technique and has been widely used to combat inter-symbol-interference (ISI) resulting from multipath propagation in RFCs. So far, the technique of OFDM has also been successfully applied into IM/DD optical wireless systems. In this dissertation, the author focuses on the system design and performance analysis of a novel power-efficient scheme based on OFDM for IM/DD OWCs. This dissertation is divided into four main sections. In the first part, a novel power-efficient scheme, called asymmetrically and symmetrically clipped optical (ASCO)-OFDM, for intensity modulation direct detection (IM/DD) optical wireless systems is proposed. The average bit rate versus (vs.) normalized bandwidth and the optical power per bit of this novel scheme are expressed by a closed form, respectively. The symbol error rate (SER) performance is investigated when optical signals are transmitted in a flat fading channel. Simulation results show that this proposed scheme can achieve better performances in terms of both power efficiency and symbol error rate (SER) when the optical power of transmitted signals is limited. In the second part, an improved receiving technique is applied into the conventional receiver of ASCO-OFDM to improve the SER performance. This technique can explore and reuse some useful information hidden in the received signals. The detection procedure is described in detail and the improved SER performances are presented for different constellation cases. In the third part, the information rates of ADO-OFDM and ASCO-OFDM are obtained for an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with an average transmitted optical power constraint. In the last part, this novel power efficient scheme, ASCO-OFDM, is extended into two-dimensional (2D) IM/DD optical wireless systems. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that this technique not only achieves high average bit rate, but reduces the Peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) as well