Flip-OFDM for Unipolar Communication Systems

Unipolar communications systems can transmit information using only real and positive signals. This includes a variety of physical channels ranging from optical (fiber or free-space), to RF wireless using amplitude modulation with non-coherent reception, to baseband single wire communications. Unipolar OFDM techniques can efficiently compensate frequency selective channel distortion in unipolar communication systems. One of the leading example of unipolar OFDM is asymmetric clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) originally proposed for optical communications. Flip-OFDM is an alternative approach that was proposed in a patent, but its performance and full potentials have never been investigated in the literature. In this paper, we first compare Flip-OFDM and ACO-OFDM, and show that both techniques have the same performance but different complexities. In particular, Flip-OFDM offers 50% saving in hardware complexity at the receiver over ACO-OFDM. We then propose a new detection scheme, which enables to reduce the noise at the Flip-OFDM receiver by almost 3dB. The analytical performance of the noise filtering schemes is supported by the simulation results.