Increasing the reach of visible light communication links through constant-envelope OFDM signals

The transmission of constant-envelope orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CE-OFDM) signals, based on electrical phase modulation, was shown to improve the tolerance to noise and the nonlinearity introduced by light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in visible light communication (VLC) systems. This allows the application of larger signal amplitudes despite the LED-nonlinearities and, thus, data transmission over larger distances. The performance of a 9.51 Mb/s CE-OFDM based system, with 16-QAM subcarrier mapping in a bandwidth of 5 MHz, was compared to the efficiency of a conventional OFDM system. The error vector magnitude (EVM) was reduced from 17.5% to 10% (which is below the FEC limit), an improvement around 43%, when the CE-OFDM scheme was applied in the VLC link of 6 m. A good performance was achieved by the CE-OFDM based VLC system in a link of 8 m, when 4-QAM was used as subcarrier mapping.