Design of PAM-DMT-based Hybrid Optical OFDM for Visible Light Communications

摘要： In this letter, a pulse-amplitude-modulated based hybrid optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (PHO-OFDM) scheme is proposed. We use the high order quadrature-amplitude-modulation to replace the one-dimensional pulse-amplitude-modulated on the even subcarriers for compensating the data capacity weakness of the conventional pulse amplitude modulated discrete multitone (PAM-DMT). The combined time-domain PHO-OFDM signal has a larger amplitude range than the original PAM-DMT but with a reduced peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). Besides that, a flexible power allocation method is introduced to the proposed PHO-OFDM systems to fully exploit the whole dynamic range of LEDs. The simulation results show that, under the same average bit rate, the proposed PHO-OFDM scheme has a better bit error rate performance compared with the conventional PAM-DMT scheme, thus demonstrating its application potential in visible light communications.