A tone reservation-based optical OFDM system for short-range IM/DD transmission

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of tone reservation for optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission in a short-range, intensity-modulated, direct-detected (IM/DD) optical channel. Due to the unipolarity of the IM/DD channel, any asymmetric clipping of the bipolar OFDM signal and associated nonlinear distortion will result in an unfavorable dc power and significant performance penalty. Using a detailed analysis of the clipping distortion, we propose a new framework to enable IM/DD optical OFDM transmission, where certain subchannels are reserved to produce a negative peak cancellation (NPC) signal via a frequency-domain digital filter. This NPC signal guarantees a u..