A Novel Approach for PAPR Reduction in OFDM-Based Visible Light
Communications
1*
Ayad Atiyah Abdulkafi, 1Mohamad Yusoff Alias, 1 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
Abstract - One of the best techniques to increase data rate
and improve spectral efficiency for indoor visible light
communication (VLC) is by employing Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). To efficiently
exploit the optical bandwidth, we propose a novel
transmission approach for OFDM based VLC that
increases the bandwidth efficiency by 50% compared to
conventional optical OFDM systems. Unlike existing
approaches of OFDM-based VLC systems, the real and
positive signal is obtained without the Hermitian symmetry
and signal clipping. Through simulation results, the
proposed scheme shows significant peak-to-average
power ratio (PAPR) reduction can be achieved, namely up
to 10dB compared to the conventional asymmetrically
clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and 5dB compared
to DC biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) at
complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of
10-1 with acceptable bit-error-rate (BER) performance.
Keywords: VLC, Optical OFDM, PAPR, BER
1. Introduction
Visible light communication (VLC) is one of the latest
wireless technologies for optical communication technique
employing light emitting diode (LED) technology. The
improvements of power efficiency and cost reduction
enable the use of LEDs for dual-purposes of both providing
illumination as well as for communication, making VLC an
economical and multi-purpose data transmission solution.
From the other side, orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing (OFDM) is considered a good candidate for
VLC systems due to its high spectral efficiency and
capacity to combat inter-symbol interferences (ISI).
However, OFDM signals need to be modified to work with
VLC systems that used intensity modulation and direct
detection (IM/DD), due to the fact that only real and
positive signals are required to drive the LEDs.
Several optical forms of OFDM such as asymmetrically
clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM), DC biased optical
OFDM (DCO-OFDM) [1-2], and unipolar OFDM (U-
OFDM) [3] have been proposed to generate real and
positive OFDM signals compatible with the LED
characteristics and IM/DD system. However, all these
forms obtain a real valued time domain signal by
978-1-5090-5140-3/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
constraining the input data vector of the inverse fast Fourier
transform (IFFT) to have Hermitian symmetry by adding
the conjugate of the complex signal before the IFFT [4].
This reduces the spectral efficiency, doubles the required
bandwidth and the system complexity. Moreover, the
constraints imposed by the dynamic range of the LED is
also limiting the signal. For example, in the DCO-OFDM
case, by adding DC-bias to the signal, the generated bipolar
signal is converted to unipolar. However, even with a large
bias, some negative peaks of the signal will be clipped and
the resulting distortion causes bit-error-rate (BER)
performance degradations due to the large peak-to-average
power ratio (PAPR) of OFDM. In ACO-OFDM, clipping of
all negative values at zero and modulating only odd
subcarriers will result in the unipolar signal. However,
ACO-OFDM sacrifices a large portion of bandwidth to
achieve the asymmetrical property. The U-OFDM scheme
transmits the positive and negative halves of the DCO-
OFDM signal in two separate parts in series but it has
higher power efficiency. The spectral efficiency of ACO-
OFDM and U-OFDM is about half the spectral efficiency
of DCO-OFDM for the same order of Quadrature
Amplitude Modulation (M-QAM). In this paper, two new
approaches are applied to the OFDM time domain signal to
ensure a real positive signal, instead of applying Hermitian
symmetry and signal clipping. This will enable the potential
improvements of OFDM based VLC performance in terms
of spectral efficiency, PAPR and BER performances.
The remainder of this paper is organized as the
following. The system models are presented in Section 2
while the simulation setup and results are presented in
Section 3. Finally, Section 4 will provide the conclusion of
the paper.
2. System Models
The block diagram of the proposed scheme is shown in
Fig. 1. The serial data bits are grouped into symbols. These
symbols, which are integers in the range [0, M-1], where M
is the M-ary number, are modulated using a QAM
modulator. The mapper assigns the symbols to sub-carriers
and the OFDM time domain signal is obtained using the
IFFT operation. The real valued time domain signal can be
obtain using the complex to real conversion (C2R) that
maps the time domain complex OFDM symbols into real
 Fig.1 The block diagram of the proposed scheme
integer symbols. A fixed length cyclic prefix (CP) is added
to avoid any ISI followed by parallel to serial (P/S) and
digital to analogue (D/A) conversions. The resulting signals
are then de-amplified and biased to be compatible with the
LED dynamic range. The reverse process will be performed
on the received signal by the photodetector (PD) after
passing the optical wireless channel (OWC) with an
additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN).
A. C2R Operation
A complex to real conversion operation is defined as the
function that converts each complex value which is
generated by the IFFT into a unique real value, where the
real and imaginary parts of a complex-valued as well as their
signs are coded to form a unique real valued. The C2R
operation can be mathematically expressed as
x R = f ( xC ) = f ( p , a , b ) (1)
where xC is the complex signal generated by the IFFT which
be expressed as a+jb in which a is the real part and b is the
imaginary part. The function f maps the complex signal xC
into real valued xR while p represents all the possible signs to
each pair of real and imaginary samples. For simplicity, the
time domain OFDM symbols (complex) are encoded into
same integers in frequency domain prior to QAM
modulator. This simple mapping is sufficient for VLC
systems because indoor transmission is very secure since
light cannot penetrate walls.
However, the real-valued time-domain OFDM signal
envelope is still characterized by a high PAPR. The PAPR is
defined as
2
max( x R )
PAPR = 2 (2)
E [ xR ]
where max (xR2) is maximum value of the OFDM signal
power, E[•] the average of those values [5]. A PAPR
complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF)
diagram is normally used to illustrate any reductions in
PAPR. The CCDF of the PAPR defines the probability that
the PAPR of an OFDM frame exceeds a given reference
value PAPR. It is the most frequently used measure for
describing PAPR reduction [6].
B. LED Dynamic Range
The dynamic range of the resulted signal (xR), DRsignal can be
defined as
DRsignal = max ( x R ) − min ( x R ) (3)
where max (xR) is the maximum value of xR and min(xR) is
its minimum value. LED dynamic range can be expressed as
DRLED = i H − i L (4)
where iH is the maximum allowed LED drive current and iL
corresponds to the minimum LED drive current according to
the LED data sheet.
C. Scaling and Biasing Operations
The second contribution of this paper is to obtain a signal
compatible with the LED dynamic range without clipping
distortion and any significant loss of information. For this,
the resulting signal needs to be slightly modified and scaled
through signal de-amplification. The biasing is then
performed by adding a DC-bias to the resulted signal to 1
Coded FDM VLC signal
adjust the minimum value of the de-amplified signal to turn 0.9
Deamplfied signal
Input signal to LED
on voltage (TOV) of the LED. In this way, the maximum
0.8
value of the signal will be fitted to the saturated point of the
LED due to the de-amplification process. The scaling factor 0.7

Normalised signal amplitude

S, can be obtained as 0.6

0.5
DRLED (5)
S=
DRsignal 0.4

0.3

0.2
Hence, the de-amplified signal xD can be written as
0.1

xD = S × xR (6) 0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
Time samples Index

The optimum biasing level can be obtained via

Fig.2 OFDM based VLC time domain signals
DCbias = TOV − min( x D ) (7)
The coded OFDM based VLC signals are still
characterized by a high PAPR. In order to evaluate PAPR
Finally, the LED input signal can be obtained after shifting reduction, the complementary cumulative distribution
above signal to its TOV as function (CCDF) of PAPR is employed which is defined as
the probability that the PAPR of an OFDM frame exceeds a
given reference value. As shown in Fig.3, the proposed
x LED = x D + DCbias model achieves significant PAPR reductions of about 10 and
(8) 5dB at a CCDF of 10-1 compared to the conventional ACO-
= x D + TOV − min( x D )
OFDM and DCO-OFDM respectively.

3. Performance Analysis BER performance is another important performance

metric for VLC communication system. However, signal
In this section, the performance analysis is presented to
clipping is required in conventional approaches to make all
provide deeper insight into the design of VLC system based
signals within the LED dynamic range, which causes BER
on OFDM scheme. Simulation results of the proposed
performance degradations. In the proposed scheme, this is
scheme in terms of PAPR and BER performance are
achieved through the deamplification and biasing process
discussed and compared with conventional OFDM
described before in Section 2, which offers a good BER
approaches in VLC system. Since the OFDM signal is
performance without clipping process.
modulated using IM/DD, the effective transmitted electrical
power will be increased due to the scaling up of the
amplitude of the signal resulting in severe clipping distortion 10
0

due to the limited dynamic range of LEDs. Therefore, it is

important to find a method to solve this issue.

In the proposed simulation, 16QAM with 64 subcarriers

are used in which signal processing applied to the time
domain signal after the IFFT to obtain a real positive signal
CCDF(dB)

without distortion. The output of these signal processing are

-1
10

shown in Fig. 2. It can be seen that the de-amplified and

LED input signal have the same shape of the coded OFDM
signal, which means there is no any distortion but they are
ACO OFDM
scaled and shifted respectively. DCO OFDM
Proposed Scheme

-2
10
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
PAPR(dB)

Fig.3 CCDF performance of the OFDM based VLC signal

with different approaches
 10
0

ACO OFDM
[3] D. Tsonev, S. Sinanovic, H. Haas, “Novel unipolar
DCO-OFDM orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (U-OFDM)
Proposed scheme
10
-1 for optical wireless” in Proc. of the IEEE Vehicular
Technol. Conf.(VTC Spring), Yokohama, Japan,
-2
pp. 1-5, May 2012.
10
[4] J. Armstrong and B. J. C. Schmidt, “Comparison
of asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM and
DC-Biased optical OFDM in AWGN”, IEEE
BER

-3
10

Comm. Lett. Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 343–345, 2008.

10
-4 [5] A. A. Abdulkafi, M. Y. Alias, and Y. S. Hussein,
“Performance Analysis of DCO-OFDM in VLC
-5
System” ” in Proc. of the 2015 IEEE 12th Malaysia
10
Int. Conf. on Comm. (MICC2015), Kuching
Sarawak, Malaysia, pp. 1-6, 2015
10
-6

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
[6] Y. S. Hussein, M. Y. Alias, and A. A. Abdulkafi, "On
SNR (dB) performance analysis of LS and MMSE for channel
Fig.4 Comparison of BER performance of OFDM based estimation in VLC systems," in Proc. of the 2016
VLC signal with different approaches. IEEE 12th Int. Colloquium on Sig. Proc. & Its
Applications (CSPA), Melaka, Malaysia, pp. 204-
The proposed system and DCO-OFDM have almost the 209, 2016.
same BER performance. It can be also noted that DCO-
OFDM slightly outperforms our proposed scheme beyond
SNR of 14 dB. The two systems have achieved better BER
performance compared to ACO-OFDM scheme as depicted
in Fig. 4.

4. Conclusions
In this paper, a novel approach for transmitting the
OFDM signals without Hermitian symmetry and signal
clipping is proposed. Compared to conventional methods,
the proposed method can increase spectral efficiency while
reducing PAPR. The proposed scheme increases the
bandwidth efficiency by 50%. Simulation results show that
the proposed scheme yields a significant PAPR reduction
up to 10dB and 5dB at CCDF of 10-1 compared to the
conventional ACO-OFDM and DCO-OFDM respectively
with acceptable BER performance. In order to further
improve the BER performance of the proposed system,
future works will initially include the channel estimation
methods and investigate their impact on the PAPR of the
optical OFDM signals in the proposed VLC model.

Acknowledgements
This work was collaboratively carried out by Multimedia
University and Telekom Research & Development Sdn
Bhd.

References
[1] J. Armstrong, “OFDM for optical communications”, J.
Lightwave Technol. Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 189–204. 2009
[2] R. Jiang, Q. Wang, F. Wang, L. Dai, Z. Wang, “An
optimal scaling scheme for DCO-OFDM based visible
light communications”, Opt. Commun. Vol. 356, No.
Dec 1, pp. 136–140. 2015.