On the Capacity of the 2-User IM-DD Optical Broadcast Channel

The capacity of the intensity-modulation directdetection (IM-DD) optical broadcast channel (OBC) is investigated. The OBC is modeled as a Gaussian channel with input-independent noise and both average and peak input constraints. Outer and inner bounds on the capacity region are derived. The outer bounds are based on Bergmans´ approach. The inner bounds are based on superposition coding with either truncated-Gaussian or discrete input distributions. By comparing the bounds, we observe that the truncated- Gaussian distribution is nearly optimal at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). At low SNR on the other hand, on-off keying (OOK) combined with time-division multiple-access (TDMA) is optimal; it achieves any point on the boundary of the developed outer bound. This is interesting in practice since both OOK and TDMA have low complexity. At moderate SNR (typically [0; 8] dB), a discrete input distribution with a small alphabet size achieves a fairly good performance.