Clipping Noise Mitigation in Optical OFDM Systems

This letter describes a new non-linear algorithm for clipping noise mitigation in intensity modulation/direct detection dc biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) systems. Clipping noise is often the major limitation in DCO-OFDM. In this letter, we show that extra information about the clipped signal can be extracted using a non-linear process and then used to mitigate the clipping noise. The effectiveness of the new algorithm is demonstrated by simulation and in an optical wireless experiment.