Precoding techniques for PAPR reduction in asymmetrically clipped OFDM based optical wireless system

In this paper, we have analyzed different precoding based Peak-to-Average-Power (PAPR) reduction techniques for asymmetrically-clipped Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) optical wireless communication systems. Intensity Modulated Direct Detection (IM/DD) technique is among the popular techniques for optical wireless communication systems. OFDM cannot be directly applied to IM systems because of the bipolar nature of the output signal. Therefore some variants of OFDM systems have been proposed for (IM/DD) optical wireless systems. Among them are DC-biased-OFDM, Asymmetrically-Clipped Optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) [2] and Pulse Amplitude Modulated Discrete Multitone (PAM-DMT) [3]. Both ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT require low average power and thus are very attractive for optical wireless systems. OFDM systems suffer from high PAPR problem that can limit its performance due to non-linear characteristics of LED. Therefore PAPR reduction techniques have to be employed. This paper analyzes precoding based PAPR reduction methods for ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT. We have used Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) coding, Zadoff-Chu Transform (ZCT) [8] and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) for ACOOFDM and only DCT for PAM-DMT since the modulating symbols are real. We have compared the performance of these precoding techniques using different QAM modulation schemes. Simulation results have shown that both DFT and ZCT offer more PAPR reduction than DCT in ACO-OFDM. For PAM-DMT, DCT precoding yields significant PAPR reduction compared to conventional PAM-DMT signal. These precoding schemes also offer the advantage of zero signaling overhead.