Signal restoration in intensity-modulated optical OFDM access systems

It is well known that deliberate signal clipping in an intensity-modulated (IM) laser transmitter helps to overcome the optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system performance limitation that is related to the signal high peak-to-average power ratio. The amplitude of a clipped OFDM signal has to be optimized in order to minimize the optical power that is required to achieve a specified system performance. However, the signal clipping introduces nonlinear distortion (so-called clipping noise) and leads to a system performance penalty. In this Letter, the performance of the IM optical OFDM system with digital baseband clipping distortion in the transmitter and clipping noise compensation by means of signal restoration in the digital signal processing unit of the system receiver is analytically evaluated. It is demonstrated that the system bit-error ratio can be reduced by more than an order of magnitude, from 10(-3) to 3.5 x 10(-5), by applying only the first iteration of the signal restoration algorithm proposed in this Letter. The results of the analytical analysis are verified with brute-force numerical simulations based on direct error counting. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America