Comparison of Optical OFDM and M-PAM for LED-Based Communication Systems

Abstract

Light-emitting diode (LED)-based communications, such as visible light communications and infrared communications, are candidate techniques to provide short-range and high-speed data transmission. In this letter, $M$ -ary pulse amplitude modulation (M-PAM), used as a high bandwidth efficiency scheme, is compared with three well-known optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) schemes. Considering the bandwidth limit and constrained peak transmitted power characteristics of LEDs, a bit loading algorithm and a single-tap equalizer with an optimized modulation index are used for the optical OFDM schemes tested. To reduce the inter-symbol interference caused by the bandlimited channel, an optimized pulse shape and a minimum mean squared error equalizer are applied to the M-PAM system. From numerical results, M-PAM can provide a substantially higher data rate than OFDM for bandlimited channels. When the channel bandwidth is ample compared with the symbol rate, optical OFDM outperforms M-PAM.