On the study of the relation between linear/nonlinear PAPR reduction and transmission performance for OFDM-based VLC systems

The relation between the peak-to-average-power-ratio (PAPR) reduction schemes and the transmission performance of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based visible light communication (VLC) system is experimentally investigated. The linear selective mapping (SLM) scheme and the nonlinear logarithmic companding scheme are optimized by considering both PAPR reduction and bit error rate (BER) performance. It is demonstrated that the logarithmic companding scheme, albeit providing larger PAPR reduction when compared to the SLM scheme, may result in worse BER performance due to the additional noise induced in its expanding process. Both numerical and experimental investigations show that, at the expense of increased complexity and reduced efficiency, the VLC system using the linear SLM scheme exhibits better BER performance compared to the system using the nonlinear logarithmic companding scheme. We show that for a 400-Mb/s transmission at a distance of 1 m, the BER can be reduced from 2.02 × 10 -3 o 2.51 × 10 -4 by using logarithmic companding scheme. By using the linear SLM scheme, the BER can be further reduced to 1.77 × 10 -6 .