Iterative receiver for ADO-OFDM with near-optimal optical power allocation

Visible light communication (VLC) systems using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are attracting increasing interests due to its inherent benefits such as high spectral efficiency, resistance to frequency-selective channels and so on. In this paper, a novel iterative receiver is proposed for asymmetrically clipped DC biased optical OFDM (ADO-OFDM), where asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and DC biased OFDM (DCO-OFDM) signals are transmitted simultaneously. In our proposed iterative receiver, ACO-OFDM and DCO-OFDM time-domain signals are distinguished firstly. Then pairwise clipping, negative clipping and pairwise averaging are utilized in the iterative receiver to reduce the effect of noise and interference. In addition, an optimal solution to the optical power allocation factor for ACO-OFDM and DCO-OFDM signals is derived. Furthermore, to reduce the computational complexity, an approximation of the optimal solution is obtained. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results indicate that the approximate solution is near-optimal, and only a few detection iterations are required for the iterative receiver.