Improved Receiver Design for Layered ACO-OFDM in Optical Wireless Communications

Layered asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (LACO-OFDM) is recently proposed for intensity-modulated directed-detected optical wireless communications, which achieves higher spectral efficiency compared with the conventional ACO-OFDM, since different layers of ACO-OFDM signals are combined to utilize more subcarriers. In this letter, an improved receiver is proposed for LACO-OFDM, which distinguishes different layers of ACO-OFDM signals in the time domain. After that, the structure of ACO-OFDM signals in each layer is exploited to further reduce the noise and inter-layer interference, resulting in the improved performance. Simulation results show that the proposed receiver for LACO-OFDM achieves significant gain over its conventional counterpart.