Performance Analysis of DCO-OFDM in VLC

System
Ayad Atiyah Abdulkafi, Mohamad Yusoff Alias and Yaseein Soubhi Hussein
Faculty of Engineering, Multimedia University, Persiaran Multimedia, 63100, Cyberjaya, Selangor, Malaysia
al.ayad@yahoo.com, yusoff@mmu.edu.my, yaseein@ieee.org

AbstractThe performance of indoor visible light communication

(VLC) systems using a direct current-biased optical orthogonal
frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) scheme is
investigated in this paper. The impact of nonlinearity of Light
Emitting Diode (LED) and its beam angle on the VLC system
performance is studied. We later analyze the effect of modulation
order, number of subcarriers, signal scaling and biasing operation
on the peak to average power ratio (PAPR) which is a major issue
in OFDM based VLC system. Simulation results show that the bit
error rate (BER) decreases as the degree of nonlinearity increases
and a better BER can be achieved as the LED behavior
approaches linear model. In addition, it is shown that reducing the
QAM order or increasing the number of subcarriers may reduce
the effect of the LED nonlinearity, thus improving the BER
performance of the VLC system. Moreover, it is demonstrated
that PAPR is higher for a large number of subcarriers and
modulation order. Finally, the PAPR of the visible light OFDM
system can significantly be reduced by employing the signal
scaling combined with biasing operation.
Keywords-component; VLC, Optical OFDM, PAPR, BER

I.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, there has been constantly increasing interest

in visible light communication (VLC) motivated by the
dramatic development of light emitting diode (LED)
technologies and the scarce spectrum resources. The radio
frequency (RF) spectrum is becoming more congested, highly
regulated, and expensive to license [1-3]. VLC refers to short
range optical wireless communication (OWC) using visible
light spectrum from 380 to 780 nanometers. It provides the
potential for multi-gigabit per-second data rate communication
at short distances with ~300 THz of available visible light
spectrum at low power and cost, using simple LED and
photodiode (PD) [4] In addition, the VLC systems that use the
infrastructure of the indoor illumination system have been
envisioned as a compact, safe, and green alternative to WiFi for
the downlink of an indoor wireless mobile communication
system [5].
However, the inherent nonlinearity of LEDs is a challenge
for optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OOFDM) due to its sensitivity to the resulting distortion [6].
LEDs have a minimum threshold value known as the turn-on
voltage (TOV) which is the onset of current flow and light
emission (below the TOV, the LED is considered in a cut-off

region and is not conducting current). Above the TOV, the

current flow and light output increases exponentially with
voltage. The LED outputs light power that is linear with the
drive current. However, thermal aspects causing a drop in the
electrical-to-optical (E/O) conversion efficiency (light output
of the LED decreases and slowly approaches a steady-state
value; LEDs self-heating characteristic) must be considered.
Consequently, the dc and ac/pulsed currents must be adjusted
accordingly to ensure that the LED chip does not overheat [7].
In [8] it has been demonstrated that through the exploitation of
the high peak to- average power ratio (PAPR) in OFDM, it is
also possible to significantly enhance the data rates of IM
optical wireless systems. Practical implementation of OFDM
for optical wireless (OW) systems using non-coherent light is
described in [6] by considering the LEDs and PDs. This
research presents the performance analysis of DCO-OFDM in
VLC system by studying the impact of modulation order, the
inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) size, LED nonlinearity,
signal scaling and biasing operation on the PAPR and bit error
rate (BER). The reminder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section II presents the system models. The simulation setup
and results are presented in Section III. Finally, conclusion is
drawn in Section IV.
II.

SYSTEM MODELS

At the system transmitter, OFDM uses IFFT to transform a

set of multiplexed, overlapping subcarriers in the frequency
domain to a signal of its time-domain equivalent form. A single
OFDM symbol carries a set of data symbols, X in the
frequency-domain. The OFDM symbol is a vector, which
consists of a set of N subcarriers. The IFFT algorithm outputs
the discrete OFDM symbol vector x in the time-domain, which
is given by [9]

xm =

1
N

N 1

Xk e

2km
N

for 0 m N 1

(1)

k =0

where N is the size of IFFT and Xk is the kth subcarrier symbol.

The corresponding FFT conversion pair to (1) can be expressed
as

Xk =

1
N

N 1

xm e
m=0

2km
N

for 0 k N 1

(2)

The output of (1) is a complex signal and cannot be used in an

intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) system such
as the LED based VLC. Hermitian symmetry is used to achieve
a real-valued IFFT output. This is a transpose-conjugate copy
of the active subcarriers, which is added to the other half of the
IFFT frame; where the elements of new IFFT input vector, XH
are [10]

X H = [ X 0 , X1 , X 2 ....X N 1 , X N , X *N 1 , X *N 2 ... X *2 , X 1* ]

(3)

and the DC component, X0 = XN = 0. This results in a 2N-point

IFFT output of the OFDM symbol. Equation (1) is modified to

xm =

2 N 1

1
N

H ,h

2hm
N

for 0 m 2 N 1

end fraction of the OFDM frame. The prefix is longer than the
estimated delay spread in the channel; this mitigates the
detrimental effect caused by the dispersive channel by
localizing it in a non-information bearing prefix of the OFDM
symbol which is later removed upon reception. The timedomain optical OFDM symbol waveform is real and bipolar.
To ensure a unipolar signal to meet IM/DD requirements, a
DC-offset is added in the DC-coupled optical OFDM (DCOOFDM) scheme. The generation and recovery of the DCOOFDM scheme is straightforward. A DC-offset (implemented
in practice as a dc-bias current to drive the LED transmitter) is
added to the generated time-domain waveform to lift the signal
into a unipolar region and is then transmitted. The total data
rate for a DCO-OFDM transmission is given by

(4)

h =0

RDCOOFDM =
th

where h is the h -subcarrier symbol of XH. The OFDM symbol

is a periodic function with a period, Tp=1/ f, and f is the
subcarrier spacing which is given by f=B/(N-1)where B is the
signal modulation bandwidth.
At the receiver, a fast Fourier transform (FFT) operation
performs the conversion from the time to the frequency domain
and each element of the FFT output Yh is given by
2 N 1

Yh =

ym e

for 0 h 2 N 1

(5)

N 1

log

Mk

(10)

k =1

where B is the modulation bandwidth and log2M represents the

number of bits per symbol of a carrier modulation scheme,
which is typically M-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM).
However, the real-valued time-domain OFDM signal envelope
is still characterized by a high PAPR. The PAPR is defined as

PAPR =

2hm
j
N

B
N

max x m
2

E[ x m ]

(11)

m =0

where y is vector consists of a set of amplitudes of the received

time-domain signal of length 2N. In an additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, the transmitted and the
received signal are given by

y = x + n AWGN

(6)

where n is AWGN noise component, by substituting (6) in (5),

2 N 1

Yh = xm e

2hm
N

2 N 1

+ nAWGN, m e

m= 0

2hm
N

for 0 h 2 N 1 (7)

where max xm2 is maximum value of the OFDM signal power,

E[] the average of those values [10]. Any reductions in PAPR
are normally illustrated using a PAPR complementary
cumulative distribution function (CCDF) diagram. The CCDF
of the PAPR is defined as the probability that the PAPR of an
OFDM frame exceeds a given reference value PAPR0 and it is
the most frequently used measure for describing PAPR
reduction [11]. The signal xm is then converted to the analog
waveform x(t) using a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). In a
DCO-OFDM system, the positive forward signal r(t) that
drives the LED must be obtained from x(t) after both a linear
scaling (LS) and a biasing operation as

m= 0

where xm and nAWGN,m are the signal and noise amplitude of the
m-th point of the 2N point time domain signal. NAWGN,h is a
Gaussian noise component of the h-th FFT output at the
receiver is given by
2 N 1

N AWGN , h =

AWGN , m

2hm
N

for 0 h 2 N 1

(8)

m=0

therefore, Equation (7) can be reduced to

Yh = X h + N AWGN , h

(9)

An advantage of OFDM transmission is that it can overcome

this ISI problem by using a cyclic prefix (CP) inserted at the
beginning of the OFDM frame. The CP is a cyclical copy of an

r (t ) = x (t ) + BDC

(12)

where and BDC are both real-valued. The forward signal y(t)
drives the LED which in turn converts the magnitude of the
input electric signal r(t) into optical intensity. The human eye
cannot perceive fast changing variations of the light intensity,
and only responds to the average light intensity. Also, linear
scaling and biasing model are adopted to ensure the forward
signal is within the dynamic range of the LED [12]. The value
BDC is the biasing level added to x(t) to ensure a unipolar
OFDM signal at the LED input, and is the parameter to scale
x(t) within the dynamic range of LED. After the scaling and
biasing operation, the resulting signal y(t) will have a mean
value BDC and a variance y2= 2 x2 where x2 is the variance

of x(t). The scale factor must be appropriately chosen to work

with the dynamic range constraints of the LED. On the other
hand, a high value of can result in a clipped optical signal.
Nonlinearity factors have a major impact on system
performance. In particular, signal amplitudes below the LED
TOV and above the LED saturation point are clipped [6]. This
is very serious problem in OFDM systems due to the large
PAPR. In analogy to a solid state power amplifier (SSPA)
model for RF domain systems, a LED non-linearity model is
proposed in [7]. The required LED model behavior can be
described as follows:

f (vLED )

f (v LED ) 2k 1 / 2k

) )
iLED (vLED ) = (1 + (
im

if vLED 0
(13)

if v LED < 0

k is a parameter to model the degree of nonlinearity (also called

the knee factor), im is the maximum permissible ac/pulsed
current through the LED, and f(vLED) is the function describing
the measured/data sheet IV characteristics. The knee factor in
(13) is set either to limit (hard clipping) or to smoothly clip
(soft-clipping) the upper peaks of the OFDM signal.
The indoor VLC channel consists of two types of links, namely
the line-of-sight (LOS) link and the non-line-of-sight (NLOS)
diffuse link [2]. Compared with the LOS link, the received
optical power from the NLOS link is usually much smaller.
Therefore only the LOS link is considered and contributions
from NLOS links are neglected [2]. Therefore, the optical pass
loss is the most important quantity to characterize the channel.
The received optical power in Watt at receiver plane in a LOS
path (ignoring the reflection of walls) is given by

Pr = Pt H (0) LOS

(14)

where Pt is the transmitted optical power, Pr is the received

optical power, and H(0) is the optical LOS path loss. The
LOS channel path loss is defined as

H (0) LOS =

A
R ( ) Ts ( ) g ( ) cos
D2

(15)

Where A is the active receiving area, D is the transmitterreceiver distance, is the angle with respect to the transmitter,
is the angle with respect to the receiver, Ts() is the filter
gain g() is the concentrator gain, and R() is the transmitter
radiant intensity which is given by

m
R ( ) =
cos m ( )
2

(16)

where m is the order of Lambertian emission. The order of

Lambertian emission m is related to the LED semiangle at
half-power 1/2 (also called the transmitter beam angle ) by

m=

ln 2
ln(cos 1 / 2 )

(17)

A photodiode is used in the receiver side to transform the

received optical intensity into the amplitude of an electrical
signal. After passing through the channel, the received signal
is obtained as
y(t) = h(t) F(r(t)) + nAWGN(t)
(18)
where y(t) represents the received distorted replica of the
transmitted signal, r(t), which is subjected to the non-linear
distortion function, F(r(t)), of the transmitter front-end. The
nonlinearly distorted transmitted signal is convolved with the
channel impulse response, h(t), and it is distorted by additive
white Gaussian noise (AWGN), nAWGN(t), at the receiver. Here,
stands for linear convolution. Since, OFDM is based on
IFFT and FFT algorithms, the implementation on the DSP is
straightforward, the following equivalent discrete model for a
noisy communication link is employed in the system
description
y = h* F( r) + nAWGN
(19)
where * stands for discrete linear convolution. It is important to
note that the noise is added in the electrical domain; hence, the
received signal can be negative as well as positive. So, unlike
the transmitted signal, the received signal is bipolar instead of
unipolar. The CP is first removed and the linear convolution is
converted to circular convolution then the signal is
demodulated using FFT. The data symbols then are extracted
from the output of FFT and QAM demodulation is achieved.
The data bits are recovered after serial-to-parallel conversion.
III.

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

A. Simulation Setup
The simulation flowchart of our investigation is shown in
Fig. 1. Data bits are randomly generated and converted from
serial to parallel to form symbols for M-QAM. The QAM
symbols are then modulated by IFFT to transform the symbols
into time-domain samples. A CP is inserted before the parallelto-serial conversion takes place. The signal is then converted to
the analog waveform using a DAC. After shifting the signal to
passband, symbol-by-symbol DC bias is added to conform with
the non-negativity constraint. The resultant signal modulates a
light source and is transmitted over the WOC channel. The
reverse process is carried out at the receiver after removing the
DC bias.
B. Results and Discussion
In this section, the parameters that are affecting the
performance of DCO-OFDM in VLC system are investigated.
The impact of LED nonlinearity degree (or knee factor), k, on
LED input-output relation is depicted in Fig. 2.

0.5

Start

0.45
0.4

Generate input bits

) (A)

0.35

LED

(v

LED

S/P conversion

0.3
0.25

0.2
0.15

QAM Modulation

k=2
k=3
k=10
k=50

0.1
0.05

IFFT

0
-0.5

0.5

vLED (V)

CP insertion and P/S conversion

Fig. 2. LED electrical-optical response for different degrees of nonlinearity k

10

k=2
k=3
k=10
k=50

DAC
10

Linear scaling and DC bias addition

BER

PAPR calculation

10
10
10

LED nonlinear distortion function

10
10

-1

-2

-3

-4

-5

-6

h(t) convolution and AWGN addition

10
12
SNR (dB)

14

16

18

20

Fig. 3. BER vs. SNR for different degrees of nonlinearity k

ADC
S/P conversion and CP removing
FFT

In addition, it is clear from Fig. 2; as the value of k increases

the LED behavior approaches linear model. In order to show
how different levels of non-linearity affect the performance of
the VLC system in term of BER, simulations are performed
with the same values of k mentioned above. As it is expected,
increasing k factor will result in improving the BER
performance as shown in Fig. 3 and less BER can be achieved
as the LED behavior approaches linear model.

QAM-Demodulation
1.2

Original OFDM signal

After adding CP
After CP, LS and DC bias

P/S conversion and bits extraction

0.8
0.6

End

Amplitude

BER performance evaluation

0.4
0.2
0

Fig. 1. Simulation Flowchart

-0.2

For demonstration purposes, the LED curves for different

values of k (k=2, 3, 10 and 50) using f (vLED) = vLED/R where R
is a normalization resistance, and im=0.5 A have been assumed.
The knee factor controls the smoothness of the transition from
the linear to the saturation region. It can be seen that the upper
saturation can be effectively controlled by the knee factor k.

-0.4
-0.6
0

50

100

150

200

Time Index

Fig. 4. OFDM signals

250

300

350

1.4

10

after D/A conversion

IFFT output

CCDF (Pr[PAPR>PAPR0])

1.2

Amplitude

1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0

10

15

20

25
30
Time Index

35

40

45

50

N=64
N=128
N=256
N=1024
10

10

10

-1

-2

-3

3.5

4.5

5.5
6
PAPR0 (dB)

6.5

7.5

Fig. 5. IFFT output and the continuous signal after D/A conversion

Fig. 7.The effect of IFFT size on PAPR performance

In practical OFDM-based systems, a CP is introduced to

preserve the orthogonality between subchannels. Also, a linear
scaling has been adopted in our simulation to make the OFDM
signal work with the dynamic range constrained VLC system
while a DC bias is added to the bipolar OFDM signal to
conform with the non-negativity constraint as shown in Fig. 4.
If the OFDM signal is not to be distorted, many of
components in the transmitter and receiver must have a wide
dynamic range due to the high PAPR of OFDM signal caused
by the peak regrowth after D/A conversion. For PAPR
reduction methods to be effective solutions to PAPR, these
methods should be performed on either the analog signal, or
an upsampled version of the digital signal. This is because
once the signal is D/A converted the peaks of the signal may
occur between the discrete samples as shown in Fig. 5.

A large IFFT size results in a narrow bandwidth of each subcarrier, which corresponds to a longer symbol period where the
influence of nonlinearity grows with an increase in the symbol
period. This increases tolerance against ISI due to delay spread.
However, the contribution of ISI in VLC systems is not as
severe as an RF system, because the frequency response of
VLC channel falls-off relatively slowly. Fig. 7 shows the
PAPR performance of OFDM signal in VLC system for
different IFFT sizes. It can be seen that the PAPR of the timedomain VLC signal grows with the number of IFFT points i.e.
the PAPR is higher for a large number of subcarriers. We also
observe that the PAPR increases with increasing the number
of subcarriers for all of the constellations. In addition, large
FFT/IFFT size is obtained at the expense of higher
computational complexity.

The PAPR performance for different QAM modulation orders

is depicted in Fig. 6 for DCO-OFDM with and without linear
scaling (LS) and DC biasing operations. It can be seen that
using LS and DC biasing method substantially outperform the
original signal in which the PAPR performance of the 16 QAM
with LS and Dc biasing is the best.

In order to study the effect of modulation order on the BER

performance, simulations are conducted with k=50 for
different QAM order as shown in Fig. 8. It is clear that as the
QAM modulation order increases, the BER increases i.e.
higher SNR is required to achieve same BER when QAM
changes from lower order to higher order schemes.

10

10

-1

10

16QAM
64QAM
128QAM
256QAM

-1

BER

CCDF (Pr[PAPR>PAPR0])

10

10

10

16QAM
16QAM + LS and DC bias
64QAM
64QAM + LS and DC bias
128QAM
128QAM + LS and DC bias
256QAM
256QAM + LS and DC bias

-2

-3

10

11

12

PAPR0 (dB)

Fig. 6. CCDF curves for PAPR of DCO-OFDM for different QAM

modulation orders with and without LS and DC biasing

10

13

10

-2

-3

10
12
SNR (dB)

14

16

18

20

Fig. 8. BER vs. SNR for different QAM for DCO-OFDM VLC system

Finally, the effect of the semiangle at half power on the optical

power distribution for four LEDs in a LOS path shown in Fig.
9. The simulation parameters for this scenario are presented in
table I. We can see that the received optical power is small at
the corners of the room. Also, there is almost uniform
distribution of optical power at the center with a maximum
power of 2.5 dBm and a minimum power of - 2.5 dBm for 70
half angle 1/2 as shown in Fig. 9.a.
TABLE I. SIMULATION PARAMETERS
Parameter
Transmitted optical power
by individual LED (Pt)
Room Size

Value
20 mW
(5 5 3) m3
(1. 25, 1.25, 3), (1.25, 3.75, 3),
(3.75, 1.25, 3), (3.75, 3.75, 3)

Location for 4 LEDs

Semiangle at half power
(1/2)
Filter gain Ts()

30, 70 degree
1

Number of LEDs per array

60 60

Active area (A)

1 cm2

Concentrator gain g()

2.5
2
1.5

Received Power(dBm)

IV.

0.5

0
0

-1
-2

-0.5

-3
-1
-4
4

-1.5
2

4
2

0
-2
-4

Y(m)

-2

-2
-4

X(m)

(a)

5
6
4
4
3
2
2
0
1
-2
0
-4
4

-1
2

4
2

Y(m)

-2

-2

-2
-4

-4

X(m)

(b)
Fig. 9. Optical Power Distribution for (a) 1/2 =70 degree and b) 1/2 = 30
degree

CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have evaluated the performance of DCO

OFDM schemes for indoor VLC. Some key issues in practical
VLC system design are discussed covering the PAPR and BER
performance. Simulation results show that the PAPR increases
significantly as the size of IFFT increases. Similar effect on
PAPR performance is observed when modulation order
changes from lower order to higher order scheme. In addition,
it has been shown that the PAPR can be reduced by using
linear scaling combined with DC biasing operation. Moreover,
it is shown that reducing the QAM order or increasing the IFFT
size may alleviate the effect of the LED nonlinearity, thus
improving the BER performance of the system. Finally, it is
demonstrated that the beam angle has a significant impact on
optical power distribution in the receiver plane based on LOS
link. However, the VLC-OFDM signal is still characterized by
a high PAPR and future work will go primarily towards
addressing this issue.
REFERENCES

Received Power(dBm)

The optical power distribution at a receiver plane with the half

angle of 30 is shown in Fig. 9.b. It is clear that there is more
than 9 dB of optical power difference between the minimum
and maximum power level, leading to high SNR in some area
and dead zone in many areas. However, such uniform power
distribution is possible to achieve by using a holographic light
shaping diffuse.

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