Optical single carrier-interleaved frequency division multiplexing for visible light communication systems

In this paper, a novel optical single carrier-interleaved frequency division multiplexing (OSC-IFDM) signaling scheme for an intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) based visible light communications (VLC) system is presented. We show that, OSC-IFDM significantly improves the peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) of the DC-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM). The reduction in the PAPR value is achieved by exploiting the symmetrical characteristics of the single carrier-interleaved frequency division multiple access (SC-IFDMA) time domain symbol, whereby the imaginary and real parts of the SC-IFDMA samples are separated and transmitted through two sub-symbols. Simulation results show that, the PAPR of OSC-IFDM is 10 dB lower than that of the DCO-OFDM scheme. We also show that the proposed scheme offers higher spectral efficiency compared to our previous work