On the performance of DCO-OFDM visible light communication systems under illumination constraints

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a DC-biased optical-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) visible light communication system and investigate its error rate performance under illumination constraints. First, we find the optimum signal power for a given DC bias level assuming a fixed number of LEDs. Then, for a desired lighting requirement, we determine the optimum combination of DC bias, signal power and the number of LEDs which gives the best bit error rate (BER) performance. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the BER under different settings under consideration.