PAPR reduction in DCO-OFDM VLC system using VLM precoding and nonlinear companding techniques

Abstract Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising and viable optical wireless communication (OWC) system that utilizes light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to achieve high data rates, energy efficiency, and resistance to electromagnetic interference (EMI). Direct-current biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) is a widely used scheme in VLC due to its high spectral efficiency. However, it suffers from significant challenges related to its elevated peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which causes nonlinear distortion and signal clipping due to LED limitations. To address this issue, this paper proposes a combination of Vandermonde-like matrix (VLM) precoding and nonlinear companding transform (NCT) techniques (specifically A -law and μ -law) over DCO-OFDM-based VLC. The VLM precoding minimizes the autocorrelation of the OFDM signal, hence reducing its PAPR, and NCT compresses the dynamic range of the signal. Simulation results indicated that the hybrid techniques achieved a PAPR reduction of around 3.5 dB (by 76 %); this is in the best case reduction compared to the conventional DCO-OFDM while maintaining an acceptable bit error rate (BER), moderately higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is required.