Twofold peak-to-average power ratio reduction technique in direct-detection optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing system

Abstract

High peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal is one of the limitations to the transmission performance of an optical OFDM system. Many PAPR reduction techniques have been proposed in previous works. However, most of them only consider a single scheme while overlooking the complementary features of these techniques. We propose a twofold PAPR reduction technique called Hadamard transform combined with a partial transmit sequence (PTS) (HTCP). The proposed HTCP scheme combines the merits of two complementary techniques, i.e., Hadamard transform and PTS, to improve the performance of the optical OFDM system in terms of PAPR and bit error rate (BER). Furthermore, the side information generated in PTS is transmitted by pilot sequences which increase the utilization of subcarriers. Least square estimation is used to estimate the pilot signal’s phase to recover the side information. The HTCP scheme is theoretically analyzed in a direct-detection optical OFDM system. Simulation results show that the HTCP scheme has a better performance with regards to PAPR and BER compared with the case of applying only the Hadamard transform or PTS technique.