A Novel Receiver Design for PAM-DMT in Optical Wireless Communication Systems

Pulse-amplitude-modulated discrete multitone (PAM-DMT) modulation is an optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing scheme, which is compatible with intensity modulation and direct detection channel. In the conventional receiver for PAM-DMT, only the imaginary parts of subcarriers are detected, while the real parts are considered as clipping noise and simply discarded, causing insufficient usage of the received power. This letter proposes a new receiver characterizing temporal and spectral diversity combining for PAM-DMT, which extracts the effective information in clipping noise to recover the data. The proposed receiver achieves a better performance than the conventional receiver with a gain of at least 2.3 dB in E_b/N₀ at the system bit error rate of 10^-5 in additive white Gaussian noise channel by simulation when using 4-PAM modulation.