Optical dual-mode index modulation aided OFDM for visible light communications

Dual-mode index modulation aided orthogonal frequency multiplexing (DM-OFDM) is recently proposed, where the spectral efficiency is enhanced compared with conventional OFDM schemes. In this paper, we propose two different optical DM-OFDM schemes for visible light communications, dual-mode index modulation aided DC-biased optical OFDM (DM-DCO-OFDM) and dual-mode index modulation aided unipolar OFDM (DM-U-OFDM). In the optical DM-OFDM schemes, subcarriers are partitioned into OFDM subblocks, divided into two groups within each subblock, and modulated by two different modes of constellations. Additional information bits can be transmitted implicitly by the indices of subcarriers modulated by the same constellation alphabet. In order to generate non-negative signals, the real-valued time-domain signals are DC-biased in DM-DCO-OFDM, whilst positive and negative signals are transmitted separately in DM-U-OFDM. At the receiver, both a maximum-likelihood (ML) detector and a log-likelihood ratio (LLR) detector are employed for signal demodulation. Besides, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed optical DM-OFDM schemes are capable of enhancing the spectral efficiency compared with other existing optical OFDM schemes, and DM-DCO-OFDM as well as DM-U-OFDM can achieve significant performance gains over their conventional counterparts at the same spectral efficiency, when the nonlinear transfer characteristic of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) is considered.