The transmission of constant-envelope orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CE-OFDM) signals, based on electrical phase modulation, was shown to improve the tolerance to noise and the nonlinearity introduced by light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in visible light communication (VLC) systems. This allows the application of larger signal amplitudes despite the LED-nonlinearities and, thus, data transmission over larger distances. The performance of a 9.51 Mb/s CE-OFDM based system, with 16-QAM subcarrier mapping in a bandwidth of 5 MHz, was compared to the efficiency of a conventional OFDM system. The error vector magnitude (EVM) was reduced from 17.5% to 10% (which is below the FEC limit), an improvement around 43%, when the CE-OFDM scheme was applied in the VLC link of 6 m. A good performance was achieved by the CE-OFDM based VLC system in a link of 8 m, when 4-QAM was used as subcarrier mapping.
In this paper, we experimentally compare orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and on-off keying (OOK) modulation in the context of the IEEE 802.15.13-2023 standard at bandwidths up to 50 MHz across a Li-Fi link with distances up to 5 m and a lateral offset up to 51°. Error vector magnitude (EVM) and bit error rate (BER) evaluations confirm that the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of OFDM limits the achievable transmission distance, but it offers higher data rates due to its higher spectral efficiency. Due to the lower PAPR, OOK-based Pulsed Modulation PHY (PM-PHY) shows a significantly higher link range. As the structure of the PM-PHY is based on OFDM symbols, the two solutions may also be combined to open a wider range of use cases for optical wireless communications.
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The nonlinearity induced by light-emitting diodes in visible light communication (VLC) systems presents a challenge to the parametrization of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The goal of the multi-objective optimization problem presented in this study is to maximize the transmitted power (superimposed LED bias-current and signal amplification) for both conventional and constant envelope (CE) OFDM while also maximizing spectral efficiency. The bit error rate (BER) metric is used to evaluate the optimization using the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II. Simulation results show that for a BER of 1×10 −3 , the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required decreases with the guard band due to intermodulation distortions. In contrast to SNR values of approximately 13 and 25 dB achieved by traditional OFDM-based systems, the VLC system with CE signals achieves a guard band of 6% of the signal bandwidth with required SNR values of approximately 10.8 and 24 dB for 4-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and 16-QAM modulation orders, respectively.
