Pilot symbol utilization for reducing peak-to-average power ratio in optical OFDM

One of the evolved technologies which has the prospect of providing huge data rate is visible light communication (VLC). Use of optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) has been demonstrated as one of the viable schemes in achieving high data rate in VLC system. However, the limitation of optical OFDM still remains the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) which results in signal distortion and increase in error rate. In this paper, we describe a technique that can mitigate high PAPR in optical OFDM using pilot symbol in the indoor VLC environment. The pilot assisted OFDM system gives 2.4 dB PAPR reduction for a 4-QAM. There is indication from the simulation results that not only can the technique reduce high PAPR but it also offers good bit error rate (BER) performance. For the BER performance of 64-QAM, the pilot symbol estimation error leads to about 0.6 dB degradation at BER of 10^-3.