Comparison of Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing and On-Off Keying in Amplified Direct-Detection Single-Mode Fiber Systems

We discuss the use of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) for combating group-velocity dispersion (GVD) effects in amplified direct-detection (DD) systems using single-mode fiber. We review known OFDM techniques, including asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM), DC-clipped OFDM (DC-OFDM) and single-sideband OFDM (SSB-OFDM), and derive a linearized channel model for each technique. We present an iterative procedure to achieve optimum power allocation for each OFDM technique, since there is no closed-form solution for amplified DD systems. For each technique, we minimize the optical power required to transmit at a given bit rate and normalized GVD by iteratively adjusting the bias and optimizing the power allocation among the subcarriers. We verify that SSB-OFDM has the best optical power efficiency among the different OFDM techniques. We compare these OFDM techniques to on-off keying (OOK) with maximum-likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) and show that SSB-OFDM can achieve the same optical power efficiency as OOK with MLSD, but at the cost of requiring twice the electrical bandwidth and also a complex quadrature modulator. We compare the computational complexity of the different techniques and show that SSB-OFDM requires fewer operations per bit than OOK with MLSD.