A spectrally efficient modified asymmetrically and symmetrically clipped optical (mASCO)-OFDM for IM/DD systems

A novel spectrally efficient modified asymmetrically and symmetrically clipped optical (mASCO)-OFDM for intensity modulated direct detection (IM/DD) systems is presented. The conventional ASCO-OFDM systems use two frames to transmit the conventional asymmetrically clipped optical (ACO)-OFDM and symmetrically clipped optical (SCO)-OFDM system. The proposed mASCO-OFDM system replaces the two frame SCO-OFDM by a single frame modified SCO (mSCO)-OFDM. The mSCO-OFDM clips the data on only one side of the symmetry and performs an absolute function on the other side of the symmetry. This allows mASCO-OFDM to be 1.333 times more spectrally efficient than the conventional ASCO-OFDM. The mASCO-OFDM reduces its receiver’s complexity by estimating and eliminating the clipping noise distortion in time domain. Overall, this system has 43% lower complexity in comparison to ASCO-OFDM system. The mASCO-OFDM shows a better BER performance and a lower Peak Average Power Ratio (PAPR) than ASCO-OFDM. The proposed system also shows better BER performance than ACO-OFDM for the same spectral efficiency.