Optical OFDM with index modulation for visible light communications

In this paper, we propose optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (O-OFDM-IM) for visible light communications (VLC) systems employing light emitting diodes (LEDs) and photodetectors (PDs). The proposed scheme uses the indices of the active subcarriers of an optical OFDM system to transmit additional information bits. In the proposed scheme, the bipolar signals are asymmetrically clipped or DC biased and a log-likelihood ratio (LLR) calculation based detector is used to determine the indices of the active subcarriers. Our computer simulations show that the O-OFDM-IM achieves better error peformance compared to classical optical OFDM schemes.