Filtered-OFDM for Visible Light Communications

In visible light communications (VLCs), adaptive Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems can adjust the transmission parameters according to channel estimation results to improve the system performance. Filtered-OFDM (F-OFDM) is a new flexible and adaptive technology based on OFDM systems and can further improve the system performance. In F-OFDM scheme, the out-of-band emission of OFDM signal is greatly inhibited by using the filter and the guard interval of the two subbands is reduced to save the spectrum resources. In this paper, we creatively apply the F-OFDM technology to visible light OFDM systems and derive the specific signal expression. Simulation results show that as the number of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) increases, the bit error rate (BER) performance of the F-OFDM system gets worse. Compared with asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and direct current biased OFDM (DCO-OFDM) in VLCs, F-OFDM has better BER performance in 4QAM, 16QAM, and 64QAM schemes.