Performance of clipped OFDM signal in fiber

Combined deployment of optical fiber technology and wireless networks has great potential for increasing the capacity and quality of service. By using radio-over-fiber (ROF) technology, the capacity of optical networks can be combined with the flexibility and mobility of wireless access networks without significant cost increment. The radio-over-fiber concept means to transport information over optical-fiber by modulating the light with the radio signal. This article discusses the effects of using fiber in conjunction with wireless local area network IEEE 802.11a standard (WLAN) to distribute RF signals. To achieve high throughput 802.11a LAN uses an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based multicarrier wideband modulation technique. OFDM is one of the most favored modulation techniques in the WLAN scenario due to its efficient implementation and robustness against multipath and narrowband interference. One of the biggest drawbacks of OFDM is its high peak to average power ratio (PAPR). High PAPR of OFDM makes it unusable in nonlinear systems. In this article we discuss better ways to overcome the PAPR problem of the OFDM signal which will improve its performance in fiber.