Abstract

In this paper, three orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) schemes are simulated and applied in the underground mining visible light communication (UM-VLC) system. The schemes are asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM), direct current (DC) biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM), and asymmetrically clipped DC biased optical OFDM (ADO-OFDM). These techniques are evaluated and compared at different m-ary amplitude modulations (M-QAM) in the underground mining scenario based on the bit error rate (BER) metric. It is shown that, in terms of BER, the ACO-OFDM technique has a better performance compared to the other schemes presented, due to its simplicity and efficiency of the use of optical power.