Experimental Demonstration of Optical OFDM With Polarity-Separated Transmission in Rolling Shutter Based Visible Light Communication.

Using a rolling shutter camera as a receiver, visible light communication (VLC) can achieve a significantly higher sampling rate than the frame rate because of its sequential exposure mechanism. This study focuses on optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in a rolling shutter based VLC for further high-speed data rates. Because an image sensor is employed, conventional optical OFDM, such as DC-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM), must fit in the grayscale range of 0-255 levels. Therefore, DCO-OFDM suffers from poor error performance owing to its high PAPR. To address this problem, we propose a polarity-separated transmission, in which the bipolar OFDM signal is separated into positive and negative parts and then transmitted by two LEDs simultaneously. Polarity-separated transmission is expected to double the grayscale range, i.e. 0-511, and improve error performance because it reconstructs the original bipolar signal by combining the received signals from two LEDs. We experimentally demonstrate and compare the symbol error rate (SER) performance of DCO-OFDM and polarity-separated transmissions. Consequently, polarity-separated transmission improved the SER performance by 10(-2) in the fundamental frequency range of 300-700Hz when 16-PSK was adopted for subcarrier modulation.