Low-Complexity Hybrid Optical OFDM with High Spectrum Efficiency for Dimming Compatible VLC System

In visible light communications (VLC), dimming control constitutes an indispensable technique to comply with various illumination necessities and with different energy consumption constraints. Therefore, a novel dimming compatible hybrid optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCHO-OFDM) is conceived in this paper to fulfil the requirements from communications and illuminations. Explicitly, the signal branch of the unclipped asymmetrically clipped O-OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and the down/upper-clipped pulse-amplitude-modulated discrete multitone (PAM-DMT) are adaptively amalgamated in order to increase the spectrum efficiency. For the sake of precisely achieving dimming control, the chromaticity-shift-free and industry-preferred pulse width modulation (PWM) is further invoked to the hybrid signal, assisted by a time-varying biasing scheme to mitigate the non-linear distortion. As the different signal components in DCHO-OFDM are beneficially combined in an interference-orthogonal approach, the transmitted symbols are able to be readily detected upon relying on a standard OFDM receiver, as that of ACO-OFDM. Our simulations demonstrate that a high spectrum efficiency of the conceived DCHO-OFDM scheme can be achieved with less fluctuation in a wide dimming range.