THO-OFDM scheme for visible light communication with noise suppression and dimming control

In recent years, visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as a dual-use technique for illumination as well as communication. In VLC system, dimming control is deemed to be an essential functionality for luminous intensity adjusting and energy saving. In this Letter, a noise-suppressed triple-layer hybrid optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (NSTHO-OFDM) is proposed and further combined with pulse width modulation (PWM) to achieve the functionality of dimming control. The proposed NSTHO-OFDM can attain a 4.28-dB maximum power gain compared with THO-OFDM with an overall bit error rate (BER) of 1 × 10-4. Moreover, the proposed dimming scheme can achieve a wide dimming range of 89.0% while maintaining a favorable BER below 3.8 × 10-3.