Bit-error-rate performance of lightwave hybrid AM/OFDM systems with comparison with AM/QAM systems in the presence of clipping impulse noise

Theoretical analysis is presented for the BER performance of hybrid AM/OFDM systems in the presence of clipping impulse and Gaussian noise. In particular, the OFDM BER has been compared with that of conventional QAM. It is found that, due to the dilution effect of the subchannels, the impact of the clipping impulse noise on BER for OFDM systems is virtually zero for reasonably large laser modulation depths. Therefore, OFDM is more suitable to the lightwave transmission of digital video.