Worst-case residual clipping noise power model for bit loading in LACO-OFDM

Layered ACO-OFDM enjoys better spectral efficiency than ACO-OFDM, but its performance is challenged by residual clipping noise (RCN). In this paper, the power of RCN of LACO-OFDM is analyzed and modeled. As RCN is data-dependent, the worst-case situation is considered. A worst-case indicator is defined for relating the power of RCN and the power of noise at the receiver, wherein a linear relation is shown to be a practical approximation. An LACO-OFDM bit-loading experiment is performed to examine the proposed RCN power model for data rates of 6 to 7 Gbps. The experiment's results show that accounting for RCN has two advantages. First, it leads to better bit loading and achieves up to 59% lower overall bit-error rate (BER) than when the RCN is ignored. Second, it balances the BER across layers, which is a desired property from a channel coding perspective.