Analysis of the Perfect Nulling Technique in ACO-OFDM for DHT Hybrid PLC-VLC System in Impulsive Noise

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the performance of the discrete Hartley transform (DHT) hybrid Power Line Communication - Visible Light Communication (PLC-VLC) system based on asymmetrically clipped optical - orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM) in impulsive noise, when the Perfect Nulling technique is utilized to analyze the combating of impulsive noise in the system. ACO-OFDM is a multicarrier modulation technique used in communications systems to allow for high data rates while adding robustness to the system. In this work, we derive the theoretical bit error rate (BER) error floor expression which enables us to calculate the error floor introduced into the system due to the nulling of data samples affected by impulsive noise, which we then compare to the simulated BER error floor. Results from this work show that the simulated BER error floor values are approximately the same as the theoretical BER error floor values with insignificant differences. The simulated BER error floor values confirmed the theoretical expression for the BER error floor derived in this work.