Hadamard Coded Modulation: An Alternative to OFDM for Optical Wireless Communications

Abstract: Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation technique susceptible to source, channel and amplifier nonlinearities because of its high peak-to-average ratio (PAPR). The distortion gets worse by increasing the average power of the OFDM signals since larger portion of the signals are affected by nonlinearity. In this paper we introduce Hadamard coded modulation (HCM) that uses the fast Walsh-Hadamard transform (FWHT) to modulate data as an alternative technique to OFDM in direct-detection wireless optical systems. This technique is shown to have a better performance for high average optical power scenarios because of its small PAPR, and can be used instead of OFDM in two scenarios: 1) in optical systems that require high average optical powers such as visible light communications (VLC), and 2) in optical wireless systems unconstrained by average power, for which HCM achieves lower bit error rate (BER) compared to OFDM. The power efficiency of HCM can be improved by removing a part of the signal's DC bias without losing any information. In this way, the amplitude of the transmitted signal is decreased and the signals become less susceptible to nonlinearity. Interleaving can be applied on HCM to make the resulting signals resistent against inter-symbol interference (ISI) effects in dispersive channels by uniformly distributing the interference over all symbols.