A Tone Reservation-Based Optical OFDM System for Short-Range IM/DD Transmission

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 unipolar OFDM signal, hence eliminating any additional biasing and/or clipping. It also produces no in-band or out-of-and distortions and requires no transmission of any side information. Beneficial tradeoffs are identified that enable an efficient use of both the available power and spectrum.