Optimum Receivers for Non-Linear Distortion Compensation of OFDM Signals in Fiber Supported Wireless Applications

In this paper, we study the performance of the optimum receiver for nonlinear distorted OFDM signals in RoF applications, which is composed by a demodulator followed by an ML detector. The demodulator observes the various intermodulation products to compute a set of sufficient statistics, while the detector observes the sufficient statistics to compute an estimate of the original data. Particularly, we concentrate on the uplink of intensity modulation/direct detection RoF system where the OFDM signal suffers from linear distortion (fading), nonlinear distortion and noise. We demonstrate that the optimum receiver outperforms the conventional OFDM receiver by several orders of magnitude.