Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
College of Engineering
Ele. & Comm. Dept.
4th year
Electrical OFDM signals are usually bipolar containing both positive and
negative peaks. It is possible to modulate an RF OFDM signal onto an
optical carrier provided a sufficient bias is added to the electrical OFDM
signal to ensure that negative peaks become positive optical powers . This
technique imposes a receiver sensitivity penalty as it requires high mean
optical powers compared to the signal content. Typically the receiver
sensitivity (the required optical power for a given bit rate) will be
degraded by over 6 dB compared with non-return to zero
modulation. We have previously demonstrated two solutions to this
problem, which are :
Remove all excursions below the mean level of the electrical OFDM
signal when converting to an optical OFDM signal. This is called
Asymmetrically-Clipped Optical OFDM. As expected from simple
Fourier theory, ACO-OFDM causes distortion of the OFDM signals, giving
rise to distortion products. However, we have shown that if only oddfrequencies are used, the distortion falls only even frequencies of the
OFDM sub-carrier grid so can be completely rejected at the receiver.
Alternatively, we can upconvert the OFDM spectrum (of bandwidth C) by
a frequency C, so that the lowest clipping noise on the received
subcarriers, but the signal quality per unit optical power is improved :We
have shown analytically and by simulations that the receiver sensitivity to
be 1.8 dB better than NRZ.
Optically modulate using a strong bias then suppress the optical carrier
using an optical filter. This also introduces clipping noise due to
intermixing of the subcarriers upon photodetection. The solution is again
to upconvert the OFDM band. A variation is to completely remove the
optical carrier at the transmitter and reintroduce it at the receiver, but this
requires a coherent receiver design which should be insensitive to
sideband so that fiber dispersion does not polarization. In both systems it
is desirable to suppress one optical cause strong nulls in the baseband
spectrum after photodetection.