Received: 22 February 2021 Revised: 24 June 2021 Accepted: 22 July 2021

DOI: 10.1002/dac.4961

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Hybrid scheme of precoder with μ-law compander for PAPR

reduction and nonlinearity improvement in ADO-OFDM
system

Nishant Sharan | Swapan Kumar Ghorai

Department of Electronics and

Communication Engineering, Birla Summary
Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, The application of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in a
India
visible light communication (VLC) system increases the peak-to-average power
Correspondence ratio (PAPR) of the system. Owing to high PAPR, the intrinsic nonlinearity of
Nishant Sharan, Department of LED is an important issue in an asymmetrically clipped DC-biased optical
Electronics and Communication
OFDM (ADO-OFDM) system. In this paper, a hybrid scheme is proposed to
Engineering, Birla Institute of
Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, Jharkhand, reduce the PAPR as well as to mitigate the nonlinearity in an ADO-OFDM
India. system. The proposed method is a combination of two ADO-OFDM formats:
Email: nishant_er07@yahoo.com
precoded ADO-OFDM and μ-ADO-OFDM. The preprocessing of the input
using a predetermined matrix (PM) in the precoder relieves the need for a
handshake at the receiver. The compression of the peak values and enhance-
ment of low amplitudes of the precoded signal in the time domain yield a low
PAPR of 2.4 dB only. Besides PAPR reduction, the union of precoder and
compander boosts the bit error rate (BER) performance of the traditional
ADO-OFDM system for μ≤128. The combination of precoder with compander
decreases the power requirements for high bit rate transmission for a reference
BER of 10
3. In this work, nonlinearity is quantified in terms of error vector
magnitude (EVM) in percent. The hybrid scheme shows an EVM of 17.23% for
0 dB input backoff power (IBO) much less than 66.4% EVM for a simple
ADO-OFDM system. In addition to low PAPR and mitigation of nonlinearity,
the proposed method shows the improvement in power spectral density (PSD)
of the system.

KEYWORDS
ADO-OFDM, EVM, PAPR, precoding, μ-law companding

1 | INTRODUCTION

In the present time, owing to the rapid increase in demand for mobile data services like online education, over the top
(OTT), live high-definition (HD) video streaming, voice over internet protocol (VoIP), e-business, and omnipresent
internet access, there is a rampant growth in global high-speed short-range indoor data network. The Cisco annual
internet report (2018–2023) suggests machine-to-machine (M2M) connections to grow from 33% in 2018 to 50% by
2023.1 It expects the contribution of IP-based home appliances to be nearly 50% of the total M2M portion by 2023, and
connected car operation is expected to accelerate to 30% during forecast space (2018–2023). To meet these demands, the

Int J Commun Syst. 2021;e4961. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1 of 15
https://doi.org/10.1002/dac.4961
2 of 15 SHARAN AND GHORAI

large bandwidth requisite puts a key challenge to the existing radio frequency (RF) spectrum. The dynamic progress of
light-emitting diodes (LEDs) motivates visible light communication (VLC) as an alternative to the bandwidth-deficit
issue. The availability of huge unlicensed spectrum, low cost, no health hazards, less power consumption, improved
security, and simple LED modulation schemes puts forward VLC as a suitable option for high-capacity next-generation
indoor wireless networks.2–4 The low LED modulation bandwidth (2–20 MHz) demands the multicarrier modulation
(MCM) schemes to achieve high-speed data transfer in VLC. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM),
which is an MCM scheme, has been extensively used in VLC in recent years. The OFDM offers robustness to the inter-
symbol interference (ISI) and gives better optical efficiency in comparison to single-subcarrier schemes such as pulse
position modulation (PPM) and on–off keying (OOK).5–8 Unlike the RF OFDM system, the VLC-OFDM system employs
intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD), where the signal needs to be real and unipolar for modulation
according to the intensity of light.9 The modulated signal in the frequency domain should exhibit Hermitian symmetry
(HS) to give a real-valued OFDM signal. The real time-domain OFDM signal obtained after IFFT operation should be
guaranteed to be nonnegative. In recent times, different variants of O-OFDM systems like direct current (DC)-biased
optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM),10 asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM),11 Flip-OFDM,12 and pulse ampli-
tude modulated discrete multitone (PAM-DMT)13 have been used to get the unipolar OFDM signal for transmission.
However, these conventional schemes suffer the trade-off between power efficiency and spectral efficiency. A DCO-
OFDM system has good spectral efficiency but is less efficient in terms of optical power. ACO-OFDM, Flip-OFDM, and
PAM-DMT are high-power efficient, while the use of only half of the subcarriers for data modulation leads to 50% of
the spectral efficiency in these techniques. In contemplation of the issue of power and spectral efficiency, few hybrid O-
OFDM strategies have been proposed. A hybrid ACO-OFDM (HACO-OFDM) scheme is proposed in Ranjha and
Kavehrad.14 In the HACO-OFDM scheme, ACO-OFDM data are modulated onto odd subcarriers only and an imagi-
nary part of the even subcarriers is used for PAM-DMT transmission. In Dissanayake et al,15 asymmetrically clipped
DC-biased O-OFDM (ADO-OFDM), a hybrid modulation format, is proposed. In ADO-OFDM, odd indexed subcarriers
are used to transmit ACO-OFDM signal and DCO-OFDM signal is transmitted on even subcarriers. The other forms of
hybrid O-OFDM techniques like layered ACO-OFDM (LACO-OFDM), augmented spectral efficiency discrete multitone
(ASE-DMT), and enhanced unipolar OFDM (eU-OFDM) have been proposed.16–18 However, in all these hybrid
schemes, the addition of different subcarriers in the same phase leads to an increase in peak power resulting in a high
peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem. The PAPR of an ADO-OFDM (16 QAM ACO, 4 QAM DCO, 5.1 dB bias,
and 0.4 ACO) is nearly 12 dB.19 The nonlinear characteristic of LEDs in a VLC-OFDM system gives rise to signal distor-
tion and peak-clipping in a signal with a high PAPR value.20,21 Moreover, adding a high DC bias enhances nonlinearity
in an ADO-OFDM system. Hence, PAPR reduction, as well as alleviation of LED nonlinearity, is an important
challenge in an ADO-OFDM system. The nonlinear outcomes of LEDs can be mitigated either by lowering power
backoff values using PAPR reduction techniques or by directly increasing the linear region of input and output signal
of V–Icharacteristics of LED. Some PAPR reduction strategies have been probed to curb the LED's nonlinearity in
OFDM-based VLC systems.22–28 Hu22 and Binita and Hema23 have proposed PAPR reduction techniques in a HACO
system. In Hu,22 cyclic shifted PAM-DMT method is proposed to reduce the PAPR in a HACO system. The authors have
obtained a PAPR of 13 dB for a reference complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of 10
3. The tech-
nique shows an improvement in BER of the system, but the nonlinearity mitigation has not been highlighted. In Binita
and Hema,23 the use of partial transmit sequence (PTS) yields a low PAPR of 6 dB, but its effect on BER performance
has not been discussed. In Liu et al.,24 μ-law companding has been applied to lower the PAPR in a unipolar
ACO-OFDM (UACO-OFDM) system. Along with PAPR reduction, the technique improves the BER performance of the
system. In Ren et al,25 superimposed LACO-OFDM signal (SLACO-OFDM) has been investigated to reduce PAPR in
LACO-OFDM signal. The system gives low PAPR and better BER for high-layer ACO-OFDM system. Wang et al26 have
proposed a PAPR reduction scheme by combining superimposed O-OFDM and μ-law mapping for VLC-OFDM system.
The technique achieves low PAPR and better BER in comparison to the general ADO-OFDM system. However,
improvement in LED nonlinearity, that is, error vector magnitude (EVM), is ignored. A combination of Flip-OFDM
with μ-law mapping is proposed in Wang et al27 to decrease the high PAPR. The extended μ-law compression is applied
to unipolar asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (UACO-OFDM) system for PAPR reduction. However, the effect of
input backoff power (IBO) on LED nonlinearity has not been considered in Wang et al27 and Liu et al.28
The present paper proposes a hybrid approach consisting of precoder and companding in an ADO-OFDM system to
achieve a power-efficient data transmission with improved nonlinearity for low-input backoff values. Earlier, we have
used this hybrid technique for PAPR reduction and nonlinearity improvement in the DCO-OFDM system.29 The pro-
posed technique is formed by exploiting the merits of μ-law companding and the benefits of precoding. In the proposed
SHARAN AND GHORAI 3 of 15

method, the precoder is applied to frequency-domain DCO and ACO signals, and the time-domain signal obtained as
an output of inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) is applied to μ-law compander. The work evaluates both the power
efficiency and nonlinearity of the ADO-OFDM system.
The major contributions of the proposed strategy can be highlighted as follows:

(i) The hybrid of precoder with compander (μ-law) reduces PAPR significantly for a simple ADO-OFDM system in
comparison to companding and precoding alone.
(ii) The proposed scheme improves the BER performance of an ADO-OFDM system by 4 dB for suitable μ values
(μ ≤ 128).
(iii) The proposed method improves the requirement of normalized optical bit energy to noise power NEbo for a reference
bit error rate (BER) of 10
3.
(iv) EVM is used as a figure of merit to measure the nonlinearity of a system. The proposed combination scheme
achieves the better EVM for low IBO values.

The layout for the remaining parts of the paper is as follows. In Section 2, the transmitter and receiver sections of
the conventional ADO-OFDM and the issue of PAPR are briefly discussed. The constitutions of the proposed hybrid
scheme, precoded ADO-OFDM, and μ-ADO-OFDM are presented in Section 3. In Section 4, the proposed scheme is
introduced. The mathematical computation of PAPR, optical power efficiency, and nonlinearity of the proposed system
is discussed in Section 5. The simulation results for PAPR reduction, power efficiency, and nonlinearity are illustrated
in Section 6. Finally, a summary followed by a conclusion is outlined in Section 7.

2 | ADO-OFDM TRANSCEIVER AND P APR

The section gives the block diagrams and basic theoretical insight of transmitter and receiver sections of a conventional
ADO-OFDM system. Asymmetrically clipped DC-biased O-OFDM (ADO-OFDM) is a combination of ACO-OFDM with
DCO-OFDM. In ADO-OFDM systems, odd subcarriers are transmitted using ACO-OFDM, and DCO-OFDM is used for
even subcarriers transmission.15
The transmitter section of ADO-OFDM is shown in Figure 1. The figure shows the separate paths for time-domain
ACO-OFDM and DCO-OFDM signals. The time-domain ACO-OFDM signal, xACO(n), obtained after clipping the IFFT
output is given as19


x n , if x n ≥ 0
x ACO ðnÞ ¼ ð1Þ
0, if x n < 0

The unipolar real-valued time-domain DCO-OFDM signal, yDCO(n), obtained after adding DC bias, βDC, followed by
clipping operation on IFFT output is given by19

yDCO ðnÞ ¼ yðnÞ þ βDC þ cðnÞ ð2Þ

where y(n) is the bipolar real-valued time-domain signal. DC bias value, βDC, depends on proportional constant, μbias,
defined as 10log10 ðμ2bias þ 1Þ dB. The clipping noise c(n) depends on βDC. The transmitted time-domain ADO-OFDM
signal, zADO(n), generated by combining xACO(n) and yDCO(n) is given as

zADO ðnÞ ¼ x ACO ðnÞ þ yDCO ðnÞ ð3Þ

The summing of the signals in the same phase in IFFT operation and addition of DC bias value lead to high PAPR in
transmitted ADO-OFDM signal. The PAPR (dB) of the resulting discrete time-domain ADO signal, zADO(n), is given by

jzADO ðnÞmax j2
PAPR ðdBÞ ¼ 10 log10 ð4Þ
EjzADO ðnÞj2
4 of 15 SHARAN AND GHORAI

FIGURE 1 Transmitter of a conventional ADO-OFDM system

where jzADO ðnÞmax j2 and EjzADO ðnÞj2 are the peak and average powers of the ADO-OFDM signal, respectively.
Figure 2 shows the receiver section of the ADO-OFDM system. At the receiver, the odd data subcarriers modulated
using the ACO-OFDM scheme are first recovered using a conventional ACO-OFDM detector. The demodulation of the
DCO-OFDM system is followed by estimating and subtracting the interfering ACO-OFDM signal.

3 | PRECODED AND μ-ADO-OFDM S YSTEMS

The section presents the theoretical aspects of precoded ADO-OFDM, μ-ADO-OFDM, and the proposed ADO-OFDM
system formed by combining precoder and μ-law compander. The transceiver block diagram of the proposed model is
discussed with mathematical analysis for PAPR reduction, optical efficiency, and EVM improvement.

3.1 | Precoded ADO-OFDM

In recent times, the use of precoding matrix (PM) in OFDM VLC systems has improved the PAPR and BER leading to
an increase in data transmission performance.25 In the PM method, each modulated symbol is multiplied by a
precoding matrix Pm of order M  N given by30
2 3
p0,0 … p0,N
1
6 . .. .. 7
pm ¼ 6
4 .. . .
7
5 ð5Þ
pM
1,0 … pM
1,N
1

where M is N + Next, N is the number of baseband modulated data subcarriers, and Next are null carriers used with
0 ≤ Next < N.
SHARAN AND GHORAI 5 of 15

FIGURE 2 Receiver of a conventional ADO-OFDM system

Let X ¼ ½X 0 X 1 X 2 …X N
1 T represent the input column vector of data symbols modulated by individual subcarriers.
The output of the precoder matrix Yo obtained as the product of input modulated symbols X and precoder matrix Pm is
given by

Y o ¼ Pm X ¼ ½ Y 0 Y 1 Y 2 …Y N
1 T ð6Þ

The ith output element is given by

X N
1
Yi ¼ k¼0
pi,k X k ð7Þ

Pi,k ¼ pi,0 e
j2πN

ik
ð8Þ

8  
>
> ð
1Þi πi
>
> pffiffiffiffi sin , 0 ≤ i < Np
>
> N 2N p
>
>
<
ð
1Þi
pi,0 ¼ pffiffiffiffi , Np ≤ i < N ð9Þ
>
> N
>
>  
>
>
>
> ð
1Þi πði
NÞ
: pffiffiffiffi cos , N ≤i<M
1
N 2N p

3.2 | μ-ADO-OFDM

The μ-law companding is widely used for PAPR reduction in OFDM systems. It offers a low-complexity advantage
irrespective of data subcarrier counts. The peak valued ADO-OFDM signal is compressed, and small-amplitude signals
are expanded by μ-law compressor and expander, respectively. The compressed μ-law ADO-OFDM signal is expressed as
6 of 15 SHARAN AND GHORAI

 
vlog 1þμjzðnÞj
v sgnðzÞ
zμ ðnÞ ¼ ð10Þ
logð1 þ μÞ

where μ is the compression controlling index in the range 0–255, v is the maximum amplitude, and sgn represents the
signum function. The expansion of the signal using μ-law is expressed as
  
v zμ ðnÞð1 þ μÞ

xðnÞ ¼ exp  
μ v 
1 ð11Þ

The μ-law compressor being a nonlinear companding transform reduces the PAPR significantly at the cost of
increased BER and nonlinearity of the system.

4 | P R O P O S ED H Y B R ID A D O - O F DM S Y S T E M

The use of LEDs as transmitters is the main cause of nonlinearity in high PAPR VLC-OFDM systems. The in-band and
out-of-band distortions are the main impacts in a high PAPR system due to the nonlinear behavior of LEDs. As
discussed in Section 3.2, the μ-law companding improves the PAPR but fails to preserve the orthogonality of the system
and enhances BER and the nonlinearity of the system. In the precoding method, the transmitters with high transmis-
sion power exhibit good BER due to elevation in autocorrelation between input data symbols. The present work
suggests a hybrid ADO-OFDM system using a combination of precoder and μ-law compander. The blend of precoder
with compander reduces PAPR significantly with improvement in nonlinearity and power efficiency of the
ADO-OFDM system. The transmitter and receiver sections of the proposed hybrid ADO-OFDM scheme are shown in
Figures 3 and 4, respectively.

4.1 | The transmitter of proposed ADO-OFDM

In the transmitter section of the proposed hybrid scheme, the precoder separately preprocesses the modulated odd and
even subcarriers in the frequency domain. The preprocessing is done by multiplying the modulated data streams of
each block by a predefined matrix of order M  N given by (5). The application of a predefined precoder removes the
handshake demand between transmitter and receiver. If Xodd represents the modulated odd subcarriers, using (6),
the precoded ACO-OFDM signal yPrec, ACO obtained as the output of precoder is given by

Y Prec,ACO ¼ Pm X odd ð12Þ

The HS operation followed by IFFT and ACO clipping yields the real-valued time-domain precoded ACO signal
yprec, ACO(n). Similarly, if Xeven represents the modulated odd subcarriers, the preprocessed frequency-domain
DCO-OFDM signal is given by

Y Prec,DCO ¼ Pm X even ð13Þ

The output of HS is twice the length of input data vector of precoded ACO YPrec, ACO and precoded DCO YPrec, DCO,
which are represented by

Y oprec,ACO ¼ ½ Y prec,ACO Y 1prec,ACO Y 2prec,ACO … Y Nprec,ACO … Y 2Nprec,ACO … Y 2N
1,prec,ACO  ð14Þ

Y oprec,DCO ¼ ½ Y prec,DCO Y 1prec,DCO Y 2prec,DCO … Y Nprec,DCO … Y 2Nprec,DCO … Y 2N
1,prec,DCO  ð15Þ

and by HS property,
SHARAN AND GHORAI 7 of 15

FIGURE 3 Transmitter section of proposed ADO-OFDM system

Y 2N
k ¼ Y k∗ ð16Þ

where “*” denotes the complex conjugate of the signal. The IFFT of symmetric output followed by clipping operation
yields time-domain precoded ACO yprec, ACO(n) and yprec, DCO(n) OFDM signal. The time-domain ADO-OFDM signal
obtained as the sum of yprec, ACO(n) and yprec, ACO(n) is given by

yprec,ADO ðnÞ ¼ yprec,ACO ðnÞ þ yprec,DCO ðnÞ ð17Þ

The precoded ADO-OFDM is passed through the μ-law compander to obtain the final transmitted signal. The out-
put of the compander yμprec, ADO(n) obtained using (10) is expressed as
 
1þμjyprec,ADO j
vlog v sgnðyprec,ADO Þ
yμprec,ADO ðnÞ ¼ ð18Þ
logð1 þ μÞ

4.2 | The receiver of proposed ADO-OFDM

The receiver section of the proposed ADO-OFDM is shown in Figure 4. After removal of cyclic prefix, the received sig-
nal is passed through the inverse μ-law compander followed by N-point FFT operation. The nulls are removed from the
time-domain ADO-OFDM signal, and frequency-domain ADO signal is obtained as FFT output. ACO-OFDM signal is
retrieved simply by using conventional ACO-OFDM detection. The DCO-OFDM signal is obtained by estimating the
clipping distortion and subtracting it from the ADO-OFDM signal.
8 of 15 SHARAN AND GHORAI

FIGURE 4 Receiver section of proposed ADO-OFDM system

5 | THEORETICAL A NALYSIS O F THE PROPOSED SCHEME

The ADO-OFDM system suffers from the problem of high PAPR which gives rise to the clipping distortion and hence
degrades the performance. Owing to the limited bandwidth, an ADO-OFDM system displays an abysmal BER
performance due to frequency selective fading. In the proposed scheme, the precoder has been incorporated with the
μ-law compander in an ADO-OFDM system to refine its transmission performance. As discussed in Section 3.1, each
modulated symbol is multiplied by a predetermined precoder matrix (PM) before IFFT operation. Equations (8) and (9)
represent the cyclic shifted version of the subcarriers over a full-cycle N. The alternation in the shape of the waveforms
increases the cross-correlation among subcarriers. So, the summation of less identical phase symbols lowers the PAPR
of the system. The average power of the preprocessed signal is enhanced by applying the μ-law algorithm given by
Equations (10) and (11). The μ-law compander compresses the peak valued signal and expands the small amplitudes of
the signal. The increase in average power further reduces the PAPR of the ADO-OFDM signal. The application of the
precoder exploits the waveform property of the subcarriers to cast down the degree of autocorrelation among data
symbols. The decrease in autocorrelation of the data symbols equalizes the clipping noise and lowers the nonuniform
SNR spread, leading to improvement in the BER of the system.

5.1 | PAPR of the proposed scheme

In the proposed method, the DCO-OFDM and ACO-OFDM signals are individually preprocessed using the precoder
matrix given by relation (5) and are combined to obtain a precoded ADO signal. The output after applying μ-law
compander to the precoded ADO signal is shown by Equation (18). Using relations (4) and (18), the PAPR of the
proposed system is computed as

jyμprec,ADO ðnÞmax j2
PAPR ðdBÞ ¼ 10log10 ð19Þ
Ejyμprec,ADO ðnÞj2

5.2 | The optical power efficiency of hybrid ADO-OFDM

In the present work, the optical power efficiency of the system is computed and compared by employing a variation of
optical energy per bit Eopt to noise spectral density N0, Eb(opt)/N0 with bit rate/normalized bandwidth. The mean optical
power of the entire power received is fixed to unity for a reference BER of 10
3, <Eb(opt)/(N0)>BER is simulated against
SHARAN AND GHORAI 9 of 15

bit rate/normalized bandwidth. The position of principal spectral nulls defines the modulation bandwidth.26 The
normalized bandwidth is obtained by normalizing the modulation bandwidth relative to OOK for a similar data rate.

5.3 | Nonlinearity behavior of the proposed system

In optical VLC systems, the nonlinearity of LED is one of the major challenges for OFDM modulation schemes. In the
present work, OSRAM SFH 4230, a high-power IR LED, is used as a transmitter. The nonlinear current–voltage relation
(V–I) of LED is modeled using sixth-order polynomial with least squares curve fitting technique as shown in Figure 5.
The nonlinear distortion arising due to high PAPR and nonlinearity may lead to LED impairment while transmitting
data. The red curve shows the improvement in the nonlinear response of LED in the range of 1.3–2.1 V due to the
application of the proposed hybrid method. The effect of nonlinearity can be mitigated by lowering the IBO of LED.
The improvement in the nonlinearity of the proposed system is achieved by reducing PAPR and lowering IBO in the
linear region of OSRAM SFH 4230 in 1.6–1.7 V.31
The use of LED as a transmitter in optical OFDM affects the system linearity. The error vector is an important
metric to measure signal distortion in wireless systems. The error vector is defined as the deviation in actual reference
points due to the implementation of PAPR reduction schemes from its ideal reference points. EVM is defined as the
root-mean-square (RMS) value of the error vector. In this work, EVM in percentage is used to quantify the nonlinearity
of ADO-OFDM systems. The EVM (%) of a time-domain proposed ADO signal, zμprec, ADO(n), is given by
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
Ejzμprec,ADO ðnÞ
zðnÞj2
EVM ð%Þ ¼  100 ð20Þ
EjzðnÞj2

5.4 | Complexity aspect of the proposed method

Compander being a nonlinear operation fails to preserve the orthogonality of the system and hence destroys the symbol
detection at the receiver. In Slimane,30 it has been verified that the precoder preserves the detectability aspect of the
OFDM block. In the proposed technique, a single precoder matrix is used to preprocess all the data symbols. So, it
eliminates the processing required to optimize the individual OFDM block and minimizes the computational
complexity and time. μ-Law is a well-known widely used low-complexity technique applied in OFDM systems. So, the
overall complexity is low for the proposed blend of precoder with compander.

FIGURE 5 V–I characteristic of OSRAM SFH 4230

10 of 15 SHARAN AND GHORAI

6 | R ES U L T S A N D D I S C U S S I O N

In this section, simulated results present the performance of the hybrid ADO-OFDM in comparison with precoded
ADO-OFDM and μ-ADO-OFDM. The CCDF, BER, normalized optical bit energy per bit Eb(opt)/N0, and EVM are the
performance metrics used for performance evaluation. The results have been simulated using MATLAB (R2019a).
The key parameters used in simulation are presented in Table 1. The PAPR is computed using CCDF. The CCDF shows
probability of PAPR extension over a threshold value. The simulated CCDF and <Eb(opt)/(N0)>BER curve at a reference
BER of 10
3 for a simple ADO-OFDM are same as obtained in Sun et al.19 The paper presents the BER performance of
the proposed ADO-OFDM scheme using different QAM constellations. The current work simulates <Eb(opt)/(N0)>BER
curve for 64 subcarriers using different QAM combinations for ACO and DCO shown in Table 2. The precoder matrix
uses three null subcarriers (5% of data carriers) as overhead. SFH 4230 LED is modeled using the least squares curve
fitting procedure. A sixth-degree polynomial gives the best matching characteristics.
Figure 6 presents the CCDF plot of PAPR for the proposed method, precoded ADO-OFDM, μ-ADO-OFDM, and
ADO-OFDM systems. The results depict that the proposed hybrid ADO-OFDM system has the lowest and the conven-
tional ADO-OFDM system has maximum PAPR. Specifically, for the reference of 0.001, compared with precoded ADO
and μ-ADO, the PAPR of the proposed system reduces by 4 and 1.6 dB, respectively. The μ-law compander increases
the average power; hence, PAPR is reduced significantly. In the proposed technique OFDM, data symbols are
preprocessed in the frequency domain before passing through the compander, so the drop in PAPR is maximum.
The upgradation in the BER performance of the hybrid ADO-OFDM technique in comparison to precoded and
μ-ADO-OFDM systems appears in Figure 7. The figure gives the BER performance for 16 QAM ACO, 4 QAM DCO,
5.1 dB bias, and 0.4 ACO power. As shown in the figure, a conventional ADO-OFDM system renders a BER of 10
4 at
24.98 dB Eb(elec)/N0 (energy per bit to one-sided noise power density). The μ-law being a nonlinear companding trans-
form tends to destroy the orthogonality of the system. The application of μ-law requires very high signal power (Eb(elec)/
N0) in comparison to other ADO-OFDM schemes. The preprocessing of modulated data symbols improves the BER per-
formance by nearly 2 dB for a simple ADO-OFDM. The proposed ADO-OFDM displays an improvement of 4 dB for
μ ¼ 64 as it requires 20.96 dB Eb(elec)/N0 for the same reference BER of 10
4. However, high μ values degrade the perfor-
mance of the proposed system. As shown in the figure, at μ ¼ 128, the performance of the BER system degrades but
closely matches the precoded ADO-OFDM and still outperforms the standard ADO-OFDM. So, the BER performance
of the proposed technique is constrained by the μ values.
As shown in Figure 8, simulation is performed to compare the least required optical bit energy to noise power for a
reference BER of 10
3, <Eb(opt)/(N0)>BER versus average bit rate/normalized bandwidth. The μ-ADO displays the worst

TABLE 1 Simulation parameters

Data subcarriers 64
IFFT lengths 64
Null carriers 3
Cyclic prefix 16
Bias points (V) 1.6, 1.625, 1.65, 1.675, 1.7
LED OSRAM SFH 4230
Upsampling factor 4

TABLE 2 ACO and DCO constellations

ACO-OFDM DCO-OFDM DC bias (dB) ACO power

4 QAM 4 QAM 5.5 0.2
16 QAM 4 QAM 5.1 0.4
64 QAM 4 QAM 4.3 0.6
64 QAM 16 QAM 6.6 0.4
256 QAM 16 QAM 6.46 0.5
SHARAN AND GHORAI 11 of 15

FIGURE 6 PAPR plot for different ADO-OFDM systems

FIGURE 7 BER plot for different ADO-OFDM systems

performance among all schemes. This is because the process of companding tends to destroy the orthogonality of the
system. The combined effect of precoder with compander is most efficient in optical power for high data rate transmis-
sion. It is mainly due to the linear transformation of each OFDM data block by a shaping matrix used in the precoder
scheme leading to a reduction in noise power. So, the proposed scheme achieves the best power efficiency at the cost of
three null subcarriers only.
In this paper, EVM in percent (EVM %) is used to quantify the nonlinearity of the system. The effect of LED bias
voltages in its linear range of 1.6–1.7 V with a step size of 0.25 V is shown for IBO of 0 and 2 dB in Figure 9A,B, respec-
tively. Input backoff is an index of drop in input power Pin relative to the saturation power Psat given by

Psat
PIBO ðdBÞ ¼ 10 log10 ð21Þ
Pin

The input backoff of 0 dB corresponds to a 20 mW electrical power as a reference for simulation in all cases.25
Figure 9A,B shows the effect of IBO on EVM in LED linear region. The minimum EVM is defined as the EVM floor. At
12 of 15 SHARAN AND GHORAI

FIGURE 8 <Eb(opt)/(N0)>BER comparison for μ-ADO, ADO-OFDM precoded ADO, and proposed ADO-OFDM

FIGURE 9 EVM plot of conventional ADO-OFDM: (A) for 0 dB IBO and (B) for 2 dB IBO

a fix IBO, the nonlinearity decreases and the EVM floor is obtained at 1.7 V. The further decrease in EVM is illustrated
with increase in IBO value. The EVM reduces to 12% for 2 dB backoff in comparison to 20% for 0 dB IBO.
The comparison of mean EVM w.r.t. IBO for simple ADO-OFDM, precoded ADO, μ-ADO, and proposed system for
five LED bias points of 1.6, 1.625, 1.65, 1.675, and 1.7 V is shown in Figure 10A–E, respectively. The nonlinearity
for the companded ADO is highest in each case as the system loses the orthogonality due to the nonlinear nature of
compander. At 1.6 V, the simple ADO-OFDM shows an EVM of 51.22% in comparison to 37.61% at 1.7 V for 0 dB
power backoff. The preprocessing of the OFDM data block by a predefined matrix and commanding in time domain by
the proposed hybrid method yields the least EVM for each bias voltage. The blend of precoder with compander gives
merely an EVM of 17.23% in comparison to 63.55% for companded ADO, 37.61% for simple ADO, and 30.75% for
precoded ADO-OFDM at 0 dB IBO for 1.7 V. At 1.7 V, less than 10% of EVM is obtained for 4 dB IBO, whereas simple
ADO and precoded ADO achieves the similar performance at 6 and 5 dB, respectively.
SHARAN AND GHORAI 13 of 15

F I G U R E 1 0 Mean EVM comparison for different LED bias voltages (A) LED bias = 1.6 V, (B) LED bias = 1.625 V, (C) LED
bias = 1.65 V, (D) LED bias = 1.675 V, and (E) LED bias = 1.7 V

The improvement in nonlinearity is achieved by increasing power backoff values. However, the increase in backoff
values sometimes leads to the power penalty of the signal. Power spectral density (PSD) completely characterizes the
power statistics of a signal. The PSD comparison for the different ADO configurations is shown in Figure 11. The PSD
of a precoded ADO scheme degrades rapidly in comparison to ADO-OFDM and μ-ADO-OFDM. The result shows that
improvement in PSD can be achieved by increasing nulls. The proposed ADO with six nulls at μ ¼ 255 gives an optical
decay in PSD. The optimized out-of-band (OOB) power emission is obtained at an increase of only 5% extra null
subcarriers.
14 of 15 SHARAN AND GHORAI

FIGURE 11 Power spectral density (PSD) comparison of different ADO-OFDM systems

7 | C ON C L U S I ON S

The inherent issue of PAPR in a VLC-OFDM system degrades the nonlinearity and the spectral efficiency of the system.
In this paper, a hybrid scheme, combining precoder with μ-law compander, is investigated for ADO-OFDM format. The
proposed hybrid scheme shows a low PAPR of 2 dB only by using properties of PM and companding. In addition to
improved BER performance, the suggested scheme demands low optical bit energy for high data rate communication.
In addition to lowering PAPR, the work investigates the nonlinearity mitigation in the ADO-OFDM system. A
remarkable improvement in EVM is obtained using the application of the precoder with a compander. The combination
scheme shows an EVM of 17.23% at 1.7 V LED bias for 0 dB IBO much less in comparison with 63.55% for companded
ADO and 37.61% for precoded ADO systems. In addition to these, the proposed technique maintains a good spectral
efficiency. All of the benefits make the proposed scheme suitable for low-power high-speed mobile data services like
online education, video conferences, live video streaming, and so forth.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

ORCID
Nishant Sharan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0075-9327

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How to cite this article: Sharan N, Ghorai SK. Hybrid scheme of precoder with μ-law compander for PAPR
reduction and nonlinearity improvement in ADO-OFDM system. Int J Commun Syst. 2021;e4961. doi:
10.1002/dac.4961