296 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 4, NO. 4/APRIL 2012 Silva et al.

A PAPR Reduction Technique Based on a

Constant Envelope OFDM Approach for
Fiber Nonlinearity Mitigation in Optical
Direct-Detection Systems
Jair A. L. Silva, Adolfo V. T. Cartaxo, and Marcelo E. V. Segatto
AbstractIn this paper, we propose a new peak-to-average
power ratio reduction technique based on a constant enve-
lope orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CE-OFDM)
approach to mitigate ber induced nonlinearities in direct-
detection optical OFDM (DDO-OFDM) systems. Simulation
results show that the proposed 10 Gbps DDO-CE-OFDM
system using 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM),
2.66 GHz signal bandwidth, and different values of electrical
phase modulation index outperforms DDO-OFDM systems as it
increases the ber nonlinearity tolerance in ber links without
optical dispersion compensation. The bit error rate of the
proposed transmission scheme is decreased by a factor of 1000
if compared to conventional DDO-OFDM systems, for 10 dBm
of optical input power and considering a span of 960 km of
standard single-mode ber.
Index TermsConstant envelope OFDM signals; Fiber non-
linearity; Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM);
Peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR).
I. INTRODUCTION
O
rthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a
popular modulation technique that provides a relatively
straightforward way to accommodate high data rate links over
harsh wireless channels characterized by severe multipath
fading [1]. Recently, interest in using OFDM in optical
ber communication applications has increased due to its
potential of electrical equalization to mitigate chromatic
dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion (PMD) [25].
Experimental demonstrations have been reported for both
coherent optical (CO) OFDM (CO-OFDM) and direct-detection
optical (DDO) OFDM (DDO-OFDM) [69]. A 10 Gbps optical
DDO-OFDM system is cost effective because it requires a
simple receiver architecture as it can use the same optical
components as a 10 Gbps onoff keying system. However, the
high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) produced by large
Manuscript received July 14, 2011; revised January 5, 2012; accepted
February 16, 2012; published March 5, 2012 (Doc. ID 151008).
Jair A. L. Silva (e-mail: jsilva@ifes.edu.br) is with the Instituto Federal do
Esprito Santo, Vitria, Brazil.
Adolfo V. T. Cartaxo is with the Instituto de Telecomunicaes, Instituto
Superior Tcnico, Lisbon Technical University, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal.
Marcelo E. V. Segatto is with the Laboratrio de Telecomunicaes,
Universidade Federal do Esprito Santo, Vitria, Brazil.
Digital Object Identier 10.1364/JOCN.4.000296
amplitude uctuations of the modulated waveform is one of
the major drawbacks of this technique. The advocated multiple
subcarriers in any OFDM system makes it susceptible to
the nonlinear amplication effects commonly associated with
the transmitters power amplier (PA) [1]. Therefore, spectral
broadening, intermodulation distortion, and, consequently,
performance degradation are prominent problems to be
addressed in such multicarrier systems. In ber optical OFDM
systems, PAPR reduction techniques are important challenges
in order to increase their tolerance to optical modulator
intermodulation and ber nonlinearity impairments [10,11].
Clipping, peak windowing, coding, iterative decoding, tone
reservation, and predistortion are distinctly PAPR reduction
schemes with different effectiveness provided by tradeoffs that
may include increased complexity, reduced spectral efciency,
and performance degradation [12,13]. A suitable solution for
this impairment that is based on phase modulation is described
in [14,15]. This so-called constant envelope (CE) OFDM
(CE-OFDM) technique, which involves a signal transformation
in the transmitter and an inverse transformation at the
receiver, reduces the PAPR to 0 dB.
Recently, we have proposed a new method to improve the
tolerance to MachZehnder modulator (MZM) nonlinearities
in which a constant envelope electrical OFDM waveform that
yields 3 dB of PAPR, obtained by modulating the phase of an
electrical carrier centered on half electrical signal bandwidth,
externally modulates an optical carrier of a continuous wave
(CW) laser [16]. Subsequently, in [17], the same idea was
used to relax digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converter
(DAC/ADC) requirements in the same types of optical system.
The simulation results showed a relative improvement of
transmission capacity in comparison with conventional DDO-
OFDM systems in terms of quantization bits of the DAC/ADC.
The same signal phase transform concepts were extended more
recently in [18] by adding optical carrier suppression in order
to reduce the bandwidth and receiver complexity for the higher
optical modulation index (OMI) in 20 and 40 km of standard
single-mode ber (SSMF). However, none of those reported
discussions have considered the possibility of ber nonlinearity
improvement provided by constant envelope electrical OFDM
waveforms. Experimental demonstrations reported in [19,20]
investigate the tolerance to ber nonlinearities of optical
OFDM signals with low PAPR in DDO-OFDM systems.
Recently, Johannes et al. [21] have introduced the constant
1943-0620/12/040296-08/$15.00 2012 Optical Society of America
Silva et al. VOL. 4, NO. 4/APRIL 2012/J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW. 297
envelope OFDM concept to improve the ber nonlinearity
tolerance and the phase noise tolerance in CO-OFDM systems.
However, optical phase modulators (PMs) are used in all those
solutions instead of an electrical phase modulator prior to an
optical intensity modulator (IM) as proposed in [16].
In this paper, we extend the basic concept of the proposed
direct-detection optical constant envelope (DDO-CE) OFDM
(DDO-CE-OFDM) transmission system of SSMF without
optical dispersion compensation. We report simulation results
of a 10 Gbps DDO-CE-OFDM system using 16-QAM subcarrier
modulation and 2.66 GHz signal bandwidth. The results reveal
a substantial increase of ber nonlinearity tolerance when
compared to the conventional DDO-OFDM system.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II briey
describes the CE-OFDM method proposed in [14,15]. The most
important design aspects of the proposed DDO-CE-OFDM
transmission system are explained in Section III, with a
detailed description of its application to direct-detection
systems. Simulation results are reported in Section IV, and
concluding remarks are made in Section V.
II. CONSTANT ENVELOPE OFDM
CE-OFDM is a modulation format described by Thompson
et al. in [15] for wireless transmission systems. In this format,
an electrical carrier is phase modulated by conventional OFDM
waveforms, which results in constant complex envelope signals
with 0 dB PAPR. Therefore, it exploits the advantages of
OFDM signals and provides power efciency, as efcient
power amplication can be achieved without causing nonlinear
distortion or spectral broadening by a communication system
that shares many of the same functional blocks of a standard
DFT-based OFDM signaling format. Signal and system
denitions of the CE-OFDM format exploited in this paper are
described next.
A. Signal Description
In this constant envelope signaling format, the information-
bearing message signal is a real-valued OFDM waveform x(t) =
C

N
s
1
k=1
[X(k)] cos
_
2kt
T
_
[X(k)] sin
_
2kt
T
_
. The signal x(t)
modulates the phase of a carrier resulting in a bandpass signal
written as
s(t) ={Ae
j(t)
e
j2f
c
t
} = Acos[2f
c
t +(t)], (1)
with {X(k)}
N
s
1
k=1
the M-QAM data symbols, T =
N
F
s
the
signaling interval duration, N = 2N
s
+ 2 the fast Fourier
transform length, F
s
the sampling rate, and C a constant,
where A is the signal amplitude, f
c
is the carrier frequency,
and the phase signal during the nth signal interval nT t <
(n+1)T is
(t) =
n
+2hC
N
x(t), (2)
where h is referred to as the modulation index, C
N
is a
constant used to normalize the variance of the message signal,
and
n
is a memory term designed to make the modulation
h
h
Fig. 1. (Color online) Power spectrum of conventional OFDM and
CE-OFDM signals generated with N
s
= 64 data subcarriers mapped
on 16-QAM.
h
h
h
h
h
h
Fig. 2. (Color online) BER versus SNR performance of the simulated
CE-OFDM system over AWGN channels. (N = 2048 IFFT/FFT size,
N
s
=1023 subcarriers, 16-QAM subcarrier modulation).
phase continuous [14]. When
n
= 0, the modulation is
memoryless. The bandwidth of s(t) is usefully expressed as
B = max(2h, 1)B
W
Hz, which is an RMS (root-mean-square)
bandwidth lower bounded by the bandwidth of conventional
OFDM signals B
W
Hz, which depends on the electrical
modulation index h. Further details of CE-OFDM signal
description can be found in [14,15].
B. Electrical Phase Modulation Index h Induced Tradeoff
The modulation index h plays an important role in constant
envelope OFDM modulations as it induces a tradeoff between
signal bandwidth and system performance. It can be seen
from Figs. 1 and 2 that the system performance improves for
CE-OFDM signals with larger bandwidths.
298 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 4, NO. 4/APRIL 2012 Silva et al.
The power spectral density depicted in Fig. 1 shows that
the CE-OFDM signal bandwidth increases with h. Figure 1
also shows the bandwidth of the conventional OFDM waveform
x(t) for comparison purposes. Notice from Fig. 1 that, for high
modulation index (2h > 1), the CE-OFDM signal spectrum
has more out-of-band power than conventional OFDM. As
expected, for 2h 1, the bandwidths are almost the same.
Figure 2 gives a bit error rate (BER) comparison for different
values of the index h of CE-OFDM schemes on additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels in order to illustrate the
tradeoff induced by the electrical phase index. The simulation
results shown prove that constant envelope OFDM systems are
highly sensitive to the modulation index h. As expected, the
smaller the value of h, the worse the BER. This is explained by
the fact that the phase waveforms of CE-OFDM signals with
smaller h are more vulnerable to noise due to its narrower
dynamic range [22].
The theoretical BER approximation shown in Fig. 2 is
expressed as [15]
BER2
_
M1
Mlog
2
M
_
Q
_
2h
_
6log
2
M
M
2
1
SNR
_
, (3)
where Q(x) =
_

x
e
y
2
/2
dy/

2 is the Gaussian Q-function

and SNR = E
b
/N
0
is the bit energy-to-noise density ratio.
Its accuracy for high carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) has been
proved in [15] through simulation results of a CE-OFDM
designed for wireless channel systems. However, the constant
envelope technique we propose in this paper is suitable
for optical intensity-modulated direct-detection system. The
slight performance difference between the simulation results
and the approximation (3) shown in Fig. 2 for each phase
modulation index 2h considered can be explained by the high
CNR standard approximation normally employed in phase
demodulator receiver analysis [15].
III. SUITABLE CONSTANT ENVELOPE OFDM FOR
OPTICAL DIRECT-DETECTION SYSTEMS
The transformation technique outlined in [15] was proposed
for wireless communications in fading channels. However, the
generated complex CE-OFDM signals with PAPR = 0 dB are
not suitable for high data rate IMDD optical communication
systems that use single-drive or dual-drive MachZehnder
modulators (MZMs) as the optical modulator. Indeed, low
PAPR and real coefcient signals are desirable in the MZM
branches.
A. The Proposed DDO-CE-OFDM System
The DDO-CE-OFDM system for IMDD optical commu-
nications proposed in this paper is a modied version of
Thompsons technique [14] according to the system model
represented in Fig. 3. It provides a 3 dB PAPR electrical OFDM
signal with real coefcients to a single-drive MZM. At rst
glance, this low uctuation modulating signal diminishes the
nonlinear distortions induced by MZM operation.
CP
windowing
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data
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a
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a
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y
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T
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a
r
a
l
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e
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/
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e
r
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a
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Phase
modulator
CE-OFDM
TX
2h f
c
f
c
IFFT Inverse fast Fourier transform
CP Insert cyclic prefix
h Phase modulation index
OFDM Tx
Photodetector
FFT Fast Fourier transform
CP
1
Remove cyclic prefix
arg arctangent of an argument
CE-OFDM
RX
Phase
demodulator windowing
OFDM Rx
Digital
data
P
a
r
a
l
l
e
l
/
s
e
r
i
a
l
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e
m
a
p
p
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a
p

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e
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o
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e

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e
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s
y
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m
e
t
r
y

S
e
r
i
a
l
/
p
a
r
a
l
l
e
l
n
Fig. 3. (Color online) DDO-CE-OFDM system model.
As depicted in Fig. 3, during each block interval of T seconds,
an inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) calculates a block of
time samples {x[n]} at F
s
= N/T sampling rate. To generate
a real-valued sequence, its input is the conjugate symmetric
vector
_
0, X[1], X[2], . . . , X[N
s
], 0, X

[N
s
], . . . , X

[2], X

[1]
_
, (4)
where is a complex conjugate operator and {X[k]}
N
s
k=1
are
M-QAM parallel data subcarriers. After IFFT processing, the
time domain electrical OFDM signal x[n] =

N
k=1
X[k]e
j2kn/N
of N =2N
s
+2 real-valued coefcients is windowed by a raised
cosine lter. The generated OFDM signal phase modulates
a phase modulator with carrier frequency f
c
and phase
modulation index of 2h. After cyclical extension, a continuous
time signal of PAPR = 3 dB produced at the output of the
CE-OFDM transmitter block modulates an optical carrier by
a single-drive MZM biased at its intensity null point.
One sideband of the double-sideband signal provided by
the optical modulator is suppressed by an optical lter. The
single-sideband (SSB) optical waveform is then transmitted
over amplied
1
dispersion-uncompensated spans of standard
single-mode ber. After bandpass ltering, the optical signal
intensity is directly detected by a single photodiode.
The cyclic prex samples are discarded in the electrical
receiver side before the phase demodulator. The inverse
operations to those performed at the transmitter are then im-
plemented. The discrete phase demodulator is implemented by
an arctangent processor that simply calculates its argument,
followed by a phase unwrapper in order to minimize the effect
1
We assume that the erbium-doped ber ampliers (EDFAs) have high gain so
that amplied spontaneous emission (ASE) is the dominant noise source in the
system.
Silva et al. VOL. 4, NO. 4/APRIL 2012/J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW. 299
TABLE I
ELECTRICAL PARAMETERS OF THE DDO-CE-OFDM
SYSTEM
Electrical parameters
Parameter Value
Bit rate R
b
10 Gbps
FFT size N 2048
Number of data subcarrier N
s
=
N2
2
1023
Subcarrier modulation 16-QAM
Cyclic prex fraction CP
1
16
OFDM signal bandwidth B
w
=
R
b
N
s
(1+CP)
Nlog
2
(M)
2.66 GHz
Subcarrier spacing =
B
w
N
2.6 MHz
Cyclic prex duration T
cp
24 ns
OFDM symbol duration T
s
409 ns
Central frequency f
c
=
B
w
2
664 MHz
of phase ambiguities. Channel distortion compensation on each
subcarrier is performed before symbol M-QAM demapping by
a single-tap equalizer.
B. Optimum CSPR for DDO-CE-OFDM Systems
The carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) parameter has
a large inuence on direct-detection optical OFDM system
performance. Low CSPR increases both the signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR) and intermodulation distortions (IMDs) upon
detection, while high CSPR essentially wastes power in the
optical carrier. The CSPR is dened as
CSPR[dB] =10 log
10
_
P
c
P
in
_
, (5)
where P
c
represents the power of the optical carrier and P
in
is the data signal power at the output of the MZM biased at
its intensity null point. The optical carrier is inserted in the
optical domain (optical biasing), as suggested in [23].
We have performed back-to-back (b2b) simulations of
the proposed technique to assess the optimum CSPR that
improves the receiver sensitivity. The relevant OFDM system
parameters used in all conducted simulations are summarized
in Table I.
The results in Fig. 4 show the required optical signal-
to-noise ratio (OSNR) for BER = 10
3
of the proposed
DDO-CE-OFDM for several values of the electrical phase mod-
ulation index. Figure 4 also depicts simulation results of the
rst conventional DDO-OFDM described and experimentally
demonstrated in [24].
From Fig. 4, we can see that the optimum CSPR is found to
be 0 dB for 2h =0.8, 1.2, and 2.0, as it is for the conventional
system, which means that the best sensitivity is achieved when
the optical carrier power equals the optical signal power. As
expected, the DDO-CE-OFDM system performance strongly
depends on the phase modulation index, since the required
OSNR for BER = 10
3
is 1, 5, and 8 dB larger than that
required for the conventional system for 2h = 2.0, 1.2, and
0.8, respectively. This result conrms the intrinsic performance
and bandwidth tradeoff of phase modulation schemes.
h
h
h
Fig. 4. (Color online) Required OSNR for BER = 10
3
as function of
the CSPR.
h
h
h
Fig. 5. (Color online) Mean PAPR along link distance for common
DDO-OFDM and different electrical phase modulation index 2h of
the proposed DDO-CE-OFDM.
C. PAPR Evolution Along Fiber Links
PAPR evolution along the link due to ber nonlinearities
is an important issue in optical OFDM systems. Therefore,
it is important to analyze the effect of subcarrier phase
decorrelation due to CD in the proposed technique. Figure 5
depicts the mean PAPR
2
as a function of the link distance for
both DDO-OFDM and DDO-CE-OFDM. In these simulations,
we have considered 12 spans of 80 km SSMF with loss of
= 0.2 dB/km, dispersion of D = 17 ps/(nm.km), effective
area A
eff
= 8 10
11
m
2
, and nonlinear coefcient of = 1.365
1/(W.km) at signal wavelength =1550 nm.
It can be seen in Fig. 5 that the PAPR of the DDO-CE-OFDM
system remains below that of conventional optical OFDM
for all spans and all phase modulation indices considered.
As expected, among the phases modulation indices analyzed,
2
Calculated among 1000 transmitted symbols.
300 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 4, NO. 4/APRIL 2012 Silva et al.
the lowest PAPR value is achieved for 2h = 0.8 due
to its concentrated spectrum when compared with higher
modulation indices. It is worth noting that the subcarrier
decorrelation scales with spectral distance (subcarrier spacing)
due to CD as the signal propagates along the ber.
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION OF DDO-CE-OFDM
SYSTEM PERFORMANCE
Monte Carlo simulations are used to estimate the BER in
order to investigate the performance of the DDO-CE-OFDM
system under the inuence of ber nonlinearity impairments.
The BER is evaluated by counting the number of different bits
between the 2.7 transmitted and received millions of bits.
The ASE is assumed to be dominant over thermal and shot
noises, and it is modeled as an AWGN. Simulation results
obtained by varying the optical input power (for CSPR =
0 dB), transmission distance, and OSNR show the nonlinear
tolerance (NLT) of the proposed scheme depicted in Fig. 3.
The electrical parameters used in all conducted simulations
for both DDO-OFDM and DDO-CE-OFDM are summarized in
Table I, and the optical parameters are those described in
Subsection III.C. The signal propagation along SSMFs is
modeled by the generalized nonlinear Schrdinger equation,
which includes the CD and Kerr effect nonlinearity of the
ber. The simulation of SSMF propagation uses the split-step
Fourier method.
In Fig. 6, we compare the NLT of both the conventional
system and the proposed system along 80 km of dispersion-
uncompensated SSMF transmission, by varying the ber
optical input power from 0 to 16 dBm, for OSNR =15 dB
(see Fig. 6(a)) and OSNR =20 dB (see Fig. 6(b)). Simulation
results are depicted in Figs. 7 and 8 for 160 km (two spans
of 80 km) and 240 km (three spans of 80 km) ber lengths. We
chose those ber lengths because the nonlinear impairments
are more signicant than their effects in higher SSMF lengths.
The results shows that, in some specic cases, the proposed
DDO-CE-OFDM system outperforms conventional OFDM
systems under the inuence of ber nonlinearities since it
tolerates higher optical powers. It is less sensitive to nonlinear
Kerr effects for OSNR = 20 dB and electrical phase modulation
index 2h = 2.0 for all optical signal power P
in
values consid-
ered for 80, 160, and 240 km. The results reported in Figs. 6, 7,
and 8 also show that the increased NLT of the proposed system
depends on the modulation index 2h. It can be seen that the
conventional OFDM system outperforms the DDO-CE-OFDM
system for P
in
< 7 and 10 dBm for 2h = 1.2 and 0.8, respec-
tively, along 160 km of SSMF, and with OSNR = 20 dB. For
OSNR = 15 dB, this is true for P
in
< 6, 11, and 12 dBm, with
2h = 2.0, 1.2, and 0.8, respectively. This behavior is main-
tained in 80 and 240 km SSMF ber lengths. It is worth noting
that the DDO-CE-OFDM system performance is better when
the modulation index 2h is 2.0, despite its higher PAPR value
when compared to the other indices considered. Here, also, this
is explained by the fact that the phase waveforms of CE-OFDM
signals are more vulnerable to noise with smaller 2h [22].
In Fig. 9, we compare the NLT for both the conventional and
the proposed systems after 960 km of uncompensated SSMF
(a)
(b)
h
h
h
h
h
h
Fig. 6. (Color online) System performance after 80 km of SSMF. (a)
OSNR = 15 dB, and (b) OSNR = 20 dB.
transmission by varying the ber optical input power from 0 to
12 dBm and setting OSNR = 25 dB.
The results shown in Fig. 9 reveal that, for optical launch
power P
in
4 dBm, the conventional system performance
is better than that of the DDO-CE-OFDM systems with
2h = 0.8 and 1.2, but it is almost the same for 2h = 2.0.
However, for P
in
6 dBm, the proposed technique conrms
its robustness against nonlinearities. This is explained by the
PAPR reduction conceived by the proposed constant envelope
system. While the performance of the DDO-OFDM system
rapidly drops with optical launch power, the DDO-CE-OFDM
system performance is almost maintained for all 2h values
considered.
We can conclude from Fig. 9 that the tradeoff between
signal bandwidth and system performance associated with
the modulation index h greatly reduces with increasing ber
length. The performance difference for the three indices
considered is not signicant for 960 km of SSMF. This, and
the fact that for P
in
<6 dBm the performance of both systems
is almost the same, can be explained by the noise sensitivity of
the proposed system, which limits the transmission distance.
Silva et al. VOL. 4, NO. 4/APRIL 2012/J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW. 301
(a)
(b)
h
h
h
h
h
h
Fig. 7. (Color online) System performance after 160 km of SSMF. (a)
OSNR = 15 dB, and (b) OSNR = 20 dB.
We believe that for optical powers greater than 16 dBm
a negative impact due to nonlinearity will appear in the
DDO-CE-OFDM system performance. To our knowledge, the
proposed system also suffers from nonlinear distortion because
of the varying amplitude of the constant envelope signals,
which increases the PAPR at the end of the ber link, as
depicted in Fig. 5. We conjecture that this conclusion extends
to the performance results obtained for 80, 160, and 240 km of
SSMF for OSNR = 15 and 20 dB.
Computational simulations have been performed to assess
the BER as a function of OSNR in order to illustrate the
performance difference of the two systems considered under
the inuence of ber nonlinearities. Here, also, the BER is
evaluated by counting the number of different bits between the
2.7 transmitted and received millions of bits. The amplied
spontaneous emission is assumed to be dominant, and it is
modeled as an AWGN. The results shown in Fig. 10 were
obtained for a transmission distance of 960 km, optical input
launch power P
in
=8 dBm, and CSPR =0 dB.
The BER oor shown in Fig. 10 demonstrates the poor per-
formance of the conventional optical OFDM system without a
PAPR reduction scheme. However, for the DDO-CE-OFDM sys-
(a)
(b)
h
h
h
h
h
h
Fig. 8. (Color online) System performance after 240 km of SSMF. (a)
OSNR = 15 dB, and (b) OSNR = 20 dB.
h
h
h
Fig. 9. (Color online) System performance after 960 km of SSMF with
OSNR = 25 dB.
tem, a BER of less than 110
5
is observed at OSNR =18 dB
for electrical phase modulation parameter 2h =2.0. For 2h =
0.8 and 1.2, the proposed system outperforms the conventional
302 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 4, NO. 4/APRIL 2012 Silva et al.
h
h
h
Fig. 10. (Color online) BER as a function of the OSNR after nonlinear
propagation along 960 km of SSMF.
one for OSNR values above 16 and 20 dB, respectively. These
results also reveal a best NLT of the constant envelope
OFDM system proposed in this paper for large values of
phase modulation index h even though they enlarge the signal
bandwidth. The OSNR gains depicted in Fig. 10 for BER =
110
3
are 3.5 and 7.5 dB for 2h =1.2 and 2.0, respectively,
when compared to values for 2h =0.8.
V. CONCLUSION
A PAPR reduction technique based on electrical CE-OFDM
modulation to increase ber nonlinearity tolerance in direct-
detection optical OFDM systems has been proposed and
discussed in this paper. We have simulated transmission of
a 10 Gbps DDO-CE-OFDM system with 16-QAM subcarrier
modulation in a bandwidth of 2.66 GHz through 960 km of
uncompensated SSMF. Simulation results have shown that,
especially for phase modulation index parameter 2h = 2.0,
the proposed technique outperforms a conventional 10 Gbps
DDO-OFDM system. For 10 dBm of optical power at ber input
and OSNR = 25 dB, the achieved BER values in the proposed
DDO-CE-OFDM and conventional DDO-OFDM systems are
10
5
and 10
2
, respectively. Simulation results also show
that the proposed system outperforms the implemented
conventional DDO-OFDM system for optical power greater
than 0 dBm, OSNR =20 dB, and 2h = 2.0 for a transmission
distance up to 240 km of dispersion-uncompensated SSMF.
Such a large NLT is attractive despite the spectral efciency
reduction and increased complexity of the introduced system.
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