BER characteristic of optical-OFDM using OCI

Light-emitting diode (LED) transmitters based optical wireless communication (OWC) systems offer the potential for new generation communication systems. Particularly, an image sensor based OWC systems consist of the LED transmitters and camera receivers are expected to contribute to intelligent transport system (ITS) for driving supports. For high achievable data rates, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based OWC systems have attracted a great deal of attention. Despite attractive features of optical OFDM, only few attempts have so far been made to adopt it as a modulation scheme of an image sensor based OWC system. There remains a need for an evaluation of adopting an optical OFDM to the image sensor based OWC systems. Another important issue needs to be addressed is the performance degradation due to a frequency response of an actual image sensor device, especially a signal attenuation loss in higher frequency. In addition to such loss, a narrow band noise generated by its circuits also degrades the performance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate BER performances of the optical-OFDM using an actual image sensor device, the optical communication image sensor (OCI). From simulation results, it is found that the frequency response and the narrowband noise at 12MHz of the OCI lead to the significant reduction of BER performances. Additionally, the results shows that ACO-OFDM shows a little better performance compared to DCO-OFDM with the same bandwidth efficiency.