Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have developed a novel method that achieves up to 5 dB electrical energy savings and up to 2 dB optical

energy savings by modifying U-OFDM for VLC versus other state of the art VLC modulation techniques. Basic principles of VLC The most likely candidates for front-end devices in visible light communication (VLC) are commerciallyavailable light emitting diodes (LEDs) and photodiodes (PDs). LEDs at the transmitter emit incoherent light whose intensity is detected by the PD at the receiver. The actual phase and amplitude of the light wave cannot be modulated or detected with such front-end elements. Hence, VLC is only realizable as an intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) system. This means that the information signal is encoded into the number of photons that are passed between the transmitter and receiver at any point in time. As the number of photons can never be negative, a constraint is imposed on the signals which can be used for communication. They need to be real-valued and positive in order to be successfully mapped to light intensity. Todays standards LEDs can only be operated in response to positive electrical signals. Well-known real-valued modulation schemes from radio frequency (RF) communication can be directly translated into the visible-light domain. Such examples include on-off keying (OOK), pulse-position modulation (PPM), and pulseamplitude modulation (PAM). With the increase of the modulation speeds, however, inter-symbol interference (ISI) becomes an issue for all the aforementioned schemes. The future of VLC is OFDM A more resilient technique, such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), is desirable. OFDM allows equalization to be performed efficiently with single-tap equalizers in the frequency domain. More importantly, it allows information to be adaptively encoded into different frequency bands such that the available communication resources are always fully-utilized. At a system level, OFDM provides a straightforward multiple access technique, which needs to be implemented additionally if an alternative modulation format is employed. OFDM for VLC Conventional OFDM generates complex-valued bipolar signals, which need to be modified in order to become suitable for VLC. This operation effectively maps the information symbols onto sub-carriers in different frequency bands. A real OFDM signal can be obtained but reduces the system bandwidth by a half. This approach has been widely accepted in the literature for the generation of a real OFDM signal. The resulting waveform, however, is still bipolar in nature (it has a positive and negative part). A number of approaches have been proposed for the creation of a unipolar signal. OFDM for VLC: The unipolar signal A simple way to make a bipolar signal strictly positive is to introduce a direct current (DC) bias around which the original bipolar signal can vary. This scheme is known as DC-biased optical OFDM (DCOOFDM). The addition of the positive bias significantly increases the power dissipation in the communication system. That is why, over the last decade, a lot of research effort has been directed towards generating a unipolar OFDM signal that requires no biasing. A number of techniques have been proposed. One such example is asymmetrically-clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM), in which only the odd-indexed sub-carriers in the OFDM frame are modulated with information. This creates symmetry in the time domain where every negative sample has a positive counterpart at a precise location in the

time-domain signal. This symmetry allows all negative samples to be removed, and as a result a purely positive signal is obtained without any distortion to the useful information. U-OFDM Recently, a third technique known as unipolar OFDM (U-OFDM) has been proposed by the University of Edinburgh. It takes a real bipolar OFDM signal and generates a unipolar signal by splitting every OFDM frame (B) into two separate frames in the time domain: The first frame (P) contains the positive time-domain samples and zeros in place of the negative samples. The second frame (N) contains only the absolute values of the negative samples and zeros in place of the positive samples. At the receiver, the original bipolar frame (B) can be obtained simply by subtracting the frame containing the negative samples from the frame containing the positive samples, i.e., B = P N. The result of all these manipulations is a purely unipolar signal which requires almost no biasing. This leads to very significant electrical and optical power savings in comparison to DCO-OFDM. The drawback of ACO-OFDM and U-OFDM It comes from the fact that the structure requirements in each ACO-OFDM/U-OFDM frame sacrifice half of the information capacity in comparison to DCO-OFDM. In ACO-OFDM, the capacity reduction comes from not utilizing the evenly-indexed sub-carriers, while in U-OFDM this comes from the splitting of each bipolar OFDM frame into two unipolar frames. The ramifications of the capacity loss are significant. As a result, the three schemes lose their energy advantage over DCO-OFDM, especially when high spectral efficiency is required. Researchers have tried different techniques which either avoid or make up for the loss of capacity in the three schemes. However, no significant progress has been made until now. University of Edinburgh has recently developed a new technique which allows the spectral efficiency loss to be avoided. The Breakthrough Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have shown that the inherent information capacity loss in UOFDM, ACO-OFDM and similar techniques can be avoided by using a novel algorithm. The resulting scheme is significantly more energy efficient. Estimated electrical energy savings reach 5 dB for high spectral-efficiency signals, and estimated optical energy savings reach 2 dB.