An Adaptively Biased OFDM Based on Hartley Transform for Visible Light Communication Systems

Direct-current biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) converts bipolar OFDM signals into unipolar non-negative signals by introducing a high DC bias, which satisfies the requirement that the signal transmitted by intensity modulated/direct detection (IM/DD) must be positive. However, the high DC bias results in low power efficiency of DCO-OFDM. An adaptively biased optical OFDM was proposed, which could be designed with different biases according to the signal amplitude to improve power efficiency in this letter. The adaptive bias does not need to be taken off deliberately at the receiver, and the interference caused by the adaptive bias will only be placed on the reserved subcarriers, which will not affect the effective information. Moreover, the proposed OFDM uses Hartley transform instead of Fourier transform used in conventional optical OFDM, which makes this OFDM have low computational complexity and high spectral efficiency. The simulation results show that the normalized optical bit energy to noise power ratio (Eb(opt)/N0) required by the proposed OFDM at the bit error rate (BER) of 10-3 is, on average, 7.5 dB and 3.4 dB lower than that of DCO-OFDM and superimposed asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM), respectively.