Design and Performance Analysis of a Directly Modulated Direct Current-Biased Optical Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing Visible-Light Optical Wireless Link Under Atmospheric Turbulence
APPLIED SCIENCES, vol.16, no.6324, pp.1-27, 2026 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
- Publication Type: Article / Article
- Volume: 16 Issue: 6324
- Publication Date: 2026
- Doi Number: 10.3390/app16136324
- Journal Name: APPLIED SCIENCES
- Journal Indexes: Applied Science & Technology Source, Scopus, Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Compendex, INSPEC, Directory of Open Access Journals
- Page Numbers: pp.1-27
- İstanbul Yeni Yüzyıl University Affiliated: Yes
Abstract
This paper presents a simulation-based 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) direct current-biased optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) visible-light optical wireless system using a 520 nm InGaN directly modulated laser (DML) and direct detection over 500 m. A 1024-point transform with 511 data subcarriers provides approximately 15 Gb/s gross and 14.82 Gb/s payload rates without external optical modulators or amplifiers. Under the adopted static line-of-sight model, the simulated bit-error rate (BER) falls below at a receiver-side equivalent optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) of about 17 dB and remains below this threshold for beam divergence up to 9 mrad. Gamma–Gamma simulations show that a 5 cm aperture maintains at 20 dB OSNR up to . Pointing-error analysis gives per-axis angular-jitter standard deviations of 0.425, 0.515, and 0.564 mrad at 1% outage for 5, 10, and 15 cm apertures. The clear-air margin is exhausted at , corresponding to , or near 107 mm/h rain. For a 1.5 GHz bandwidth-limited DML, adaptive bit loading reaches 16.5 Gb/s at 28 dB OSNR. The results support a low-complexity medium-range architecture but remain numerical estimates requiring experimental validation under practical device, alignment, and weather conditions.