Background optical noises circumvention in LED optical wireless systems using OFDM

Background optical noises generated by the conventional fluorescent light sources or AC-power light-emitting diode (LED) can significantly affect the performance of the LED optical wireless communication and produce challenges to implementation. We demonstrate using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to effectively circumvent the optical background noises. Besides, by using simple equalization at the receiver side, the transmission capacity can be extended from 1 Mb/s to 12 Mb/s. The theory and analysis of the equalization are presented. Experiments at different data rates and different OFDM subcarriers are preformed, and results show that, by adjusting the number of OFDM subcarriers, the influence of the background optical noises can be significantly circumvented.