Coded DCO-OFDM Techniques in Intensity Modulation/Direct Detection (IM/DD) Systems

Abstract

Optical wireless communications (OWC) are among the best alternative techniques for transmitting information-laden optical radiation across a free-space channel from one place to another. DC-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) is a technique that sacrifices the power efficiency to transmit unipolar OFDM signals. The primary drawback with DCO-OFDM is its clipping noise, which causes distortion and lowers the bit error rate (BER). Thus, in this paper, we show the performance of DCO with different coded techniques to improve the BER in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) for IMDD systems. The experimental results show that the coded DCO-OFDM has the best performance. Furthermore, turbo coding has the best coding technique added to the DCO-OFDM system.