Visible Light Communication: An Investigation of LED Non-Linearity Effects on VLC Utilising C-OFDM

Abstract

The electro-optic output of light-emitting diodes commonly used in visible light communication systems is generally nonlinear in nature. It is particularly problematic when using advanced modulation formats, such as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), which have a high peak-to-average power ratio due to clipping and distortion. In this work, we introduce the so-called C-transform to the system architecture, which utilises a Walsh–Hadamard matrix in conjunction with a discrete cosine transform to deterministically spread the information and reduce the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). Several bias points along the electro-optic transfer function were selected for comparison purposes, and the new transform was compared with more traditional formulations of OFDM. This paper determines that the C-transform-based OFDM demonstrated the highest degree of independence from the non-linearity and yielded superior bit-error rate (BER) results. We note an improvement of ~2.5 dB in the power penalty at a BER of 10−4 in comparison to OFDM.