LEDs, particularly those used for Visible Light Communications (VLC), have a limited bandwidth, while above their 3 dB bandwidth, the roll-off is relatively gentle. If the modulation bandwidth would be limited to the 3 dB LED bandwidth, the achievable rate would be unacceptably constrained. Hence, effective communication systems need to optimize the use of bandwidth significantly above this 3 dB point. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a popular method to fine-tune the amount of power and constellation as a function of the channel response over different frequencies. Various power and bit loading strategies have been proposed and simulated in literature, but their performance was not captured in expressions. This manuscript derives these for optimal waterfilling, uniform and pre-emphasized power loading for the LED channel, that severely attenuates high frequencies. We also investigate the influence of practical discrete constellations and verify our new results experimentally. Interestingly, simple uniform loading only falls less than 1~2% short of the throughput achieved by waterfilling, but when we restrict OFDM to discrete QAM constellation sizes, the penalty for uniform loading is 1.5 dB. Inspired by the good performance of uniform power loading, we propose an algorithm to find the best discrete bit loading for uniform power within an optimized band. As pre-emphasis is nonetheless attractive because a flattened channel does not need adaptive sub-carrier loading, we quantify its penalty. This can be modest provided that the system can adapt its transmit bandwidth, thereby adaptively switching upper sub-carriers to zero power.

This paper addresses the nonlinear memory effects in the response of typical illumination light emitting diodes (LEDs), in order to enhance the performance of visible light communication (VLC) systems. These LEDs have a limited bandwidth of only several MHz. To reflect the physical mechanisms in the quantum well, we describe the LED transient response by a nonlinear dynamic differential equation. Three different mechanisms of the nonlinearity are relevant in the double hetero-structure LEDs, which result in dynamic nonlinearities, that is, a mixture of nonlinearities and memory effects. Hitherto, generic pre-distorter and non-linear equalizers have been studied for the LEDs. Yet this paper shows that recombination rates of photon generation can be translated into an equivalent discrete-time circuit that can be inverted. This allows us to develop a new pre-distorter with a simpler and more efficient structure than previously studied and overly generic approaches. The novel pre-distorter along with a parameter estimation can effectively overcome LED nonlinearity for high-speed VLC with amplitude-based single carrier modulations, including ON-OFF keying and pulse amplitude modulation-4 systems, and with the multi-carrier orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing. We report experimentally obtained eye-diagrams, first to justify our choice for the LED model on which our nonlinear pre-distorter have been based, and second to verify the effectiveness in enhancing the VLC link performance to the extent predicted by our model.