Experimental evaluation of pulse shaping based 5G multicarrier modulation formats in visible light communication systems

Abstract A performance comparison between the pulse shaping based multicarrier modulation formats, candidates for the fifth generation (5G) of wireless networks, applied to visible light communication (VLC) systems is presented in this paper. Simulation results show that filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) achieves better performance when compared to generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) and to the traditional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), in additive white Gaussian noise channels. Experimental results, obtained after propagation through a single-input single-output VLC channel, show that GFDM outperforms FBMC and OFDM, in particular for transmission distances d ≥ 1  m. Moreover, the error vector magnitude gain of ≈ 5  dB achieved by FBMC and GFDM at 2.5 m with values of signal-to-noise ratio greater than 10.5 dB suggests the adoption of these modulation formats in indoor VLC systems, if performance is the only considered requirement.