Comparison of Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing and Pulse-Amplitude Modulation in Indoor Optical Wireless Links

We evaluate the performance of three direct-detection orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) schemes in combating multipath distortion in indoor optical wireless links, comparing them to unipolar M-ary pulse-amplitude modulation (M-PAM) with minimum mean-square error decision-feedback equalization (MMSE-DFE). The three OFDM techniques are DC-clipped OFDM and asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and PAM-modulated discrete multitone (PAM-DMT). We describe an iterative procedure to achieve optimal power allocation for DC-OFDM. For each modulation method, we quantify the received electrical SNR required at a given bit rate on a given channel, considering an ensemble of 170 indoor wireless channels. When using the same symbol rate for all modulation methods, M-PAM with MMSE-DFE has better performance than any OFDM format over a range of spectral efficiencies, with the advantage of (M-PAM) increasing at high spectral efficiency. ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT have practically identical performance at any spectral efficiency. They are the best OFDM formats at low spectral efficiency, whereas DC-OFDM is best at high spectral efficiency. When ACO-OFDM or PAM-DMT are allowed to use twice the symbol rate of M-PAM, these OFDM formats have better performance than M-PAM. When channel state information is unavailable at the transmitter, however, M-PAM significantly outperforms all OFDM formats. When using the same symbol rate for all modulation methods, M-PAM requires approximately three times more computational complexity per processor than all OFDM formats and 63% faster analog-to-digital converters, assuming oversampling ratios of 1.23 and 2 for ACO-OFDM and M-PAM, respectively. When OFDM uses twice the symbol rate of M-PAM, OFDM requires 23% faster analog-to-digital converters than M-PAM but OFDM requires approximately 40% less computational complexity than M-PAM per processor.