Improving the power efficiency of enhanced unipolar OFDM for optical wireless communication

Enhanced unipolar orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (eU-OFDM) is a novel unipolar multicarrier modulation scheme used in intensity modulation and direct detection systems for optical wireless communication. It improves the spectral efficiency of unipolar OFDM at the expense of lower power efficiency. A novel symbol detection method exploiting the intrinsic signal structure of the received signal is proposed. Analysis and simulations show that the power efficiency of eU-OFDM could be improved up to 3 dB in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime using the proposed method.