A Novel Approach for PAPR Reduction in OFDM-Based Visible Light Communications

One of the best techniques to increase data rate and improve spectral efficiency for indoor visible light communication (VLC) is by employing Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). To efficiently exploit the optical bandwidth, we propose a novel transmission approach for OFDM based VLC that increases the bandwidth efficiency by 50% compared to conventional optical OFDM systems. Unlike existing approaches of OFDM-based VLC systems, the real and positive signal is obtained without the Hermitian symmetry and signal clipping. Through simulation results, the proposed scheme shows significant peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction can be achieved, namely up to 10dB compared to the conventional asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and 5dB compared to DC biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) at complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of 10(-1) with acceptable bit-error-rate (BER) performance.