An overview of indoor OFDM/DMT optical wireless communication systems

This paper is an overview of indoor OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing)/DMT (discrete multitone) optical wireless (OW) communication systems. Indoor OW OFDM/DMT systems can be classified into two groups. One group produces half-wave symmetry time signal at the output of the OFDM modulator by special assignment of subcarriers. Thus, allowing signal clipping at the zero level and avoiding the need of DC bias at the expense of data rate reduction. ACOOFDM (asymmetrically clipped OFDM system) and PAM (pulse amplitude modulation)-DMT are two techniques from the first group. The second group assigns data to all possible subcarriers to increase the data rate. However, half-wave symmetry signals cannot be achieved and DC bias is needed to convert the bipolar signal to a unipolar signal before modulating the LED (light emitting diode) intensity. DC-biased OFDM and a novel technique, proposed in this paper, called orthogonal PAM-DMT (OPAM-DMT) that is an extension of the proposed PAM-DMT by using discrete sine transform and discrete cosine transform to transmit two orthogonal signals at the same time, are two techniques from the second group. This paper considerers a practical LED model and studies the performance of all these systems in terms of average electrical OFDM signal power versus bit-error-ratio (BER) in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise channel (AWGN). It is shown that LED clipping has significant impact on the performance of all these systems and the performance of these systems substantially depends on the considered modulation order.