J. Opt. Commun.

2020; aop

Ridha Touhami*, Djamal Slimani, Ayad Atiyah Abdulkafi, Yaseein Soubhi Hussein
and Mohamad Yusoff Alias

Combined Envelope Scaling with Modified SLM

Method for PAPR Reduction in OFDM-Based VLC
Systems
https://doi.org/10.1515/joc-2019-0273 DD) is used to modulate the signal, this signal cannot be
Received November 02, 2019; accepted January 20, 2020 negative, positive and real signals bounded in the
dynamic range of the LEDs are requisites in IM-DD-based
Abstract: Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing
VLC systems [3–5]. VLC offers many advantages over RF
technique (OFDM) has been adopted widely as a modu-
transmission; it provides a huge communication unli-
lation technique for radio frequency (RF) and optical
censed bandwidth which approximately ranges from 380
communication systems such as visible-light communica-
to 780 nm, VLC does not generate radiation, which causes
tion (VLC) due to its high spectral efficiency and low-
concern about health, no co-channel interference between
complexity implementation. VLC-OFDM is recommended
VLC systems in adjacent rooms [6, 7]. VLC systems can be
in 5 G mobile communication. However, VLC-OFDM suffer
used in many areas such as the hospital, the airplane and
from the high peak to-average power ratio (PAPR). In this
the spaceship due to its slightly influence on electronic
paper, a modified selective mapping (MSLM) method is
devices [8]. VLC channel exposes frequency-selectivity due
applied to the proposed system followed by a new enve-
to the characteristics of LEDs, the solution to attain better
lope scaling process for further reductions in PAPR of
performance with a frequency-selective channel is apply-
VLC-OFDM system. Simulation results show that the pro-
ing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)
posed method reduces the PAPR by about 6.8 and 1.7 dB
technology [9]. OFDM has been used in VLC systems
comparing with the original signal and the traditional
with some modifications to adapt the intensity modulation
SLM with a number of rotation vector U = 8, respectively.
direct detection (IM/DD) channel [10]. For VLC-OFDM a
number of schemes have been proposed, direct-current-
Keywords: OFDM, VLC, PAPR, scaling, SLM
biased OFDM (DCO-OFDM), asymmetrically clipped optical
OFDM (ACO-OFDM) [11], unipolar OFDM (U-OFDM),
enhanced unipolar OFDM (eU-OFDM), spectral and energy
1 Introduction efficient OFDM (SEE-OFDM) and polar OFDM (P-OFDM)
[12]. Similar to OFDM radio frequency (RF) communication
Visible-light communication (VLC) is a communication
systems, the high peak to average power ratio (PAPR)
technique for indoor and downlink wireless networking
disadvantage also become a major problem in VLC-
system, it use the visible light spectrum to supply illumi-
OFDM system due to the additional nonlinearity of LED
nation and information transmission simultaneously by
[13, 14]. A number of methods was proposed to reduce the
the means of light emitting diodes (LEDs) [1, 2]. In VLC
PAPR VLC-OFDM system as an example DFT-Spread
systems, intensity modulation with direct detection (IM/
Combined with PTS Method [14], a pilot symbol (PS) [15]
*Corresponding author: Ridha Touhami, Electronic, University of or linearizing the LED response [16]. In [17] it demonstrated
Ferhat Abbas Setif 1, Setif 19000, Algeria, that the PAPR of the VLC-OFDM system can be reduced by
E-mail: [email protected] using the signal linear scaling (LS) combined with biasing
Djamal Slimani, Electronic, University of Ferhat Abbas Setif 1, Setif operation. In this paper we propose an expression scaling
19000, Algeria, E-mail: [email protected]
factor combined with SLM technique to reduce the PAPR
Ayad Atiyah Abdulkafi, Electrical Engineering, Tikrit University,
Salahadin, Tikrit 43001, Iraq, E-mail: [email protected]
in VLC-OFDM system. This paper is organized as follows:
Yaseein Soubhi Hussein, Department of Information Technology & Section 2 describes the VLC-OFDM system. Section 3
Computer Science, Ahmed Bin Mohammed Military College, Qatar, explains The problem of PAPR, SLM and proposed PAPR
Doha, Qatar, E-mail: [email protected] reduction methods are presented. The simulation results
Mohamad Yusoff Alias, Faculty of Engineering, Multimedia are presented in Section 4. Finally, the conclusions are
University, Cyberjaya, Selangor, Malaysia,
given in Section 5.
E-mail: [email protected]
2 R. Touhami et al.: Combined Envelope Scaling

2 OFDM-VLC System intensity, so, any complex values should be avoided. A

real value OFDM baseband signal can be generated by
OFDM is one of the modern multicarrier modulation tech- constraining the input to the IFFT operation to have
nique in telecommunication systems, it has been applied Hermitian symmetry. Half the available subcarriers are
widely in many wireless communication. The principle of used to carry the complex conjugate of the data symbols
OFDM is transmitting the data by dividing the stream into [4, 19] as shown in Figure 2.
parallel bit streams, each one of these data streams will
be modulated onto subcarriers. OFDM is robustness ver-
sus multi-path fading, lSI (Inter Symbol Interference) and
frequency selective channel, and has high spectral effi-
ciency [18]. Due to the latest advantages, OFDM is also Figure 2: Sample IFFT input frame (transposed).

used in optical communications including free space

optics and VLC. In the optical wireless system using where ½
* is the complex conjugate operation. In addition,
LEDs, the most effective modulation is intensity modula- X0 and XN2 are set to zero. The IFFT operation modulates
tion (IM) in which the communication signal is modu- the sub-carriers and generates the time domain OFDM
lated onto the instantaneous power of the optical carrier. signal,
The most practical down conversion technique is direct
detection (DD) so a proportional current to the received  
1 XN − 1 2πnk
instantaneous power will be generated with optical detec- xk = n=0 n
X exp j (1)
N N
tor. In the DD demodulation scheme, only the intensity of
the optical wave is detected. Therefore, indoor optical
applications use IM/DD as a practical transmission to where xk with k = 0, · · ·, N − 1, are the N time-domain
realize simple and low-cost optical modulation and output samples, and Xn with n = 0, ·· ·, N − 1, are the
demodulation [19–21]. input symbols [19].
A basic model of indoor DCO-OFDM systems is illus- After generating the OFDM symbol xk , it is then
trated in Figure 1. In OFDM system, the serial stream of converted from parallel to serial, a cyclic prefix (CP) is
data demultiplexed into parallel streams, each one is added to avoid multipath induced ISI, and the resulting
transmitted on a separate sub-carrier, multi-level quad- signal is digital to analog converted (DAC) to obtain a
rature amplitude (M-QAM) modulation schemes are con- bipolar real-valued OFDM signal xðtÞ in the time
sidered, each stream is transmitted on a independent domain. In a DCO-OFDM system, the positive forward
subcarrier. The VLC-OFDM model is identical to the clas- signal yðtÞ that drives the LED must be obtained from
sical OFDM system but with some modifications. The xðtÞ after application a linear scaling (LS) and a biasing
OFDM baseband signal is used to modulate the LED operation.

Figure 1: Block diagram of the VLC-OFDM system.

 R. Touhami et al.: Combined Envelope Scaling 3

yðtÞ = αxðtÞ + BDC (2) 3 Peak-to-average power ratio

where the real value BDC is the biasing level added to xðtÞ OFDM has a major disadvantage of high PAPR, it can
to ensure a unipolar OFDM signal at the LED input, and affect the performance of communication system which
real value α is the scaling factor to scale xðtÞ within the is defined as the ratio of the maximum instantaneous
dynamic range of LED [3, 4, 17]. power to the average power [20, 24], which is given by:
After the scaling and biasing operation, the resulting
signal y(t) will have a mean value BDC and a variance
maxjxk j2
σ2y = α2
σ2x , where σ2x is the variance of xðtÞ. PAPR = (4)
E jxk 2 j
In VLC systems, LEDs are used to transmit information
and illuminate at the same time, and they are the principal
where maxjxk j2 is maximum value of the OFDM signal
source of nonlinearities in addition the VLC system is
power, Ej.jdenotes the statistical expectation.
limited by the dynamic range of the LED [3, 22]. In [3],
In VLC-OFDM system, the linear dynamic range of
the authors assume that the characteristic input-output of
the light emitting diode is very limited, which is similar to
the LED is linearized in limited interval [VTOV , VSAT ] as
the radio frequency OFDM (RF-OFDM) communication
shown in Figure 3.
system, the high PAPR problem also become a prominent
drawback of visible light OFDM system. PAPR can be
considered as a random variable, and is best character-
ized by the complementary cumulative distribution func-
tion (CCDF) [24]. The CCDF of the PAPR is defined as the
probability that the PAPR of an OFDM frame exceeds a
given reference value PAPR0 and it is the most frequently
used measure for describing PAPR reduction.

CCDF = P ðPAPR > PAPR0 Þ = 1 − P ðPAPR ≤ PAPR0 Þ = 1 − CDF

(5)

In this paper, we consider the SLM method in reduction

Figure 3: Linear LED input-output characteristic [3]. of PAPR.

where VTOV is the turn-on voltage, and VSAT denotes the

saturation input voltage. 3.1 SLM technique
OSAT denotes the output optical power at VSAT and
OAVG is the average optical power. SLM is an attractive and commonly employed technique
The dynamic range of the LED is defined as for reducing PAPR in OFDM systems due to its simplicity
in structure [25–27], in this method we choose efficient
DR = VSAT − VTOV (3) phase rotation factors the PAPR to improve the perform-
ance of SLM OFDM. The block diagram of SLM scheme is
At the receiver, the inverse operations are executed, the depicted in Figure 4.
OFDM symbols are captured when optical signals are The principle of SLM is as follows [28, 29]:
detected and converted by the photoelectric detector Firstly, the data input signal X sequence of length N
and ADC conversion, respectively, the cyclic prefix and is serial to parallel converted. The obtained data stream is
DC-biased are removed. Then, the FFT operator is per- given by vector X = ½X0, X1, X2 . . . XN − 1T
formed, the FFT operation reproduces the mirrored frame Then it is multiplied with U randomly generated
structure designed in the transmitter. The upper half phase rotation sequence P of the length N, P ðU Þ .
(elements 2 to M + 1) of this frame is retained as the
valid result. The complex data is then passed through h i
ðuÞ ðu Þ
P ðuÞ = P0








PN − 1 (6)
the QAM demodulator to recover the binary data [11, 23].
4 R. Touhami et al.: Combined Envelope Scaling

values, so when the value of α decreases the PAPR is

decreased.
This proposed scaling factor αp depend directly on
the diode characteristics ðDR, BDC Þ which are explained in
Section 2 and scale automatically the signal x(t) without a
fixed value for α and allows to reduce the PAPR .

4 Simulation results
The OFDM suffer from high PAPR which flow from the
Figure 4: Block diagram of SLM scheme.
superposition of a large number of usually sub-channels.
Hence, careful regulation of the OFDM signal envelope is
ðU Þ ðuÞ
ðuÞ necessary to control distortion levels. In addition, the
Pk = ej’k , ’k 2 ½0, 2π , (7)
LED must be biased to avoid maximum distortion, while
respecting energy consumption and cell coverage needs.
0 ≤ k < N, 0 ≤ u ≤ U In this section, the complementary cumulative distribu-
tion functions (CCDFs) of the average power and the
This multiplication resulting in a set of U different possi- maximum instantaneous voltage of an DCO-VLC-OFDM
ble transmit symbols symbol are shown for the SLM method and for the pro-
posed method combined with SLM. The simulation
parameters are presented in Table 1.
X ðU Þ = XP ðUÞ (8)

Table 1: Simulation parameters.

After this, the U possible transmit vectors are converted
to the time domain via the IFFT
Parameter Value
  Input subcarrier number 
xðU Þ = IFFT X ðU Þ (9) size of IFFT/FFT 
Modulation QAM,  QAM
Phase rotation factors ,,,
Finally, the transmit symbol with the lowest PAPR is
chosen for transmission. The elements of the phase vec-
tors are restricted from the set { ± 1, ± j} to simplify com-
plex multiplications [25, 28]. Figures 5 and 6 show the PAPR performance of proposed
method and SLM with U = 2, 4, and 8 compared with the
original DCO-OFDM system under 16QAM and 64QAM
modulations. It is clear that the proposed method
3.2 Proposed method (alphap + SLM) has the lowest PAPR compared with
SLM VLC-OFDM and the original systems.
In order to solve the problem of PAPR or to reduce it in As an example in Figure 5, when the CCDF value is
VLC-OFDM system, firstly we apply SLM method, which 10 − 3 the PAPR for the original VLC-OFDM is about
is used widely in RF-OFDM system. Secondly, we com- 17.48 dB, whereas it is reduced from about 4 to 5 dB for
bined the SLM method with our proposed expression for U = 2 to U = 8, respectively for SLM VLC-OFDM, at the
the scaling factor α shown as follows: same time PAPR is reduced from 6 to 6.5 dB for proposed
method (SLM + alpha p) with U = 2 to U = 8 respectively.
minðDR, BDC Þ As shown in Figure 7 for the original VLC system
αp = (10)
maxðDR, BDC Þ based on DCO-OFDM is compared with using SLM and
proposed alpha combined with SLM method for rotation
the idea was proposed after some tests on the value of α. phase factor U = 16 we see that the PAPR performance of
Some values are applied to α shows us that there is a SLM method is better than the original and the proposed
proportional variation between the PAPR and these alpha combined with SLM is better than the both.
 R. Touhami et al.: Combined Envelope Scaling 5

Figure 5: Effect of (alphap + SLM) on the performance of PAPR VLC Figure 7: Effect of (alpha p + SLM) with U = 16 on the performance
system under 16 QAM modulation. of PAPR VLC system under 16QAM modulation.

the traditional SLM technique. As a future works, we will

apply our proposed expression factor with other PAPR
reduction methods.

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