Ellipse-based DCO-OFDM for visible light communications

•Ellipse-based DCO-OFDM is proposed for VLC against nonlinear distortions.•The proposed E-DCO-OFDM achieves significant PAPR reduction of DCO-OFDM.•The performance of E-DCO-OFDM is enhanced by optimizing the system parameters.•The optimized E-DCO-OFDM achieves significant performance gain over DCO-OFDM.

Ellipse-based DC-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (E-DCO-OFDM) is proposed for visible light communications (VLC), which achieves a significant peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction, thus enhancing the overall performance when light-emitting diode (LED) nonlinearity is considered. In E-DCO-OFDM, the real-valued output of OFDM is modulated onto an ellipse, whereby only the imaginary part of the complex point on the ellipse is transmitted. Although the PAPR of E-DCO-OFDM decreases as the ratio of major radius to minor radius becomes larger, it may be more vulnerable to the effect of noise, leading to the performance loss. Therefore, the relationship between the system performance and the critical parameters in E-DCO-OFDM, such as the ratio between the major and minor radius of the ellipse, is investigated. Meanwhile, simulations demonstrate that E-DCO-OFDM adopting the optimal parameters achieves a considerable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain over the conventional DCO-OFDM.