A New Optical OFDM Waveform Alternative to DCO-OFDM for IM/DD Communication Systems

In this study, it is recommended that a new Hermitian symmetry-free DCO-OFDM (HS-Free DCO-OFDM) scheme, built on time division multiplexing (TDM) to further increase the spectrum efficiency of the DCO-OFDM system, which is one of the spectrum efficient optical OFDM techniques for intensity modulation/direct detection (IM/DD) communication systems. It is aimed to combine the proposed waveform and channel coding techniques in this performed study to improve BER performance without sacrificing spectrum efficiency. Computer simulation studies are carried out to test the performance of this proposed new waveform and to compare it with other optical OFDM techniques. From the produced numerical results, it is understood from the obtained results that 10 dB SNR gain is achieved against the DCO-OFDM waveform and 16 dB against the classical VLC-OFDM waveform without sacrificing the spectrum efficiency with the proposed coded HS-Free DCO-OFDM waveform.