An Experimental Comparison of Different Bit-and-Power-Allocation Algorithms for DCO-OFDM

This research comprises an end-to-end experimental comparison of the bit-rates and bit error-rates of four major adaptive bit-and-power allocation algorithms for dc biased optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing. The comparison includes studying different channel conditions and different numbers of subcarriers. The experimental results show that all the methods compared display similar performance without significant superiority of a single method, even though in theory some difference is expected. Our analysis of the experimental data showed that the main reason for the uniformity in performance is the high variance in the channel estimation, especially at higher frequency subcarriers.