PAPR Reduction using Selective Mapping of an ACO-OFDM Hybrid PLC/VLC System for IoT Applications

The recent advances and developments in Internet of Things (IoT) have enabled numerous IoT applications in various sectors such as smart healthcare, industrial IoT and smart lighting. In this paper, the performance of IoT devices in a hostile environment is investigated, more specifically, for monitoring applications in underground environments. The considered system will utilise the existing power line communication (PLC) channels and visible light communication (VLC) technology to communicate the data collected underground to the overground gateways. To enhance the suggested system's performance, we implement preprocessing at the transmitting IoT node so that the signal detection at the receiving node becomes more efficient. The proposed hybrid PLC/VLC network system utilises selective mapping (SLM) method for PAPR reduction and asymmetrically clipped optical-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM). Closed-form analytical expressions for three different performance metrics, namely, likelihood of blanking error, likelihood of correct detection and output signal-to-noise ratio, will be derived and validated with computer simulations. The results demonstrate that the proposed system can considerably improve the reliability and detection accuracy of impulsive noise.