Tolerance-Aided Interference Degradation for Optical OFDM in Power-Constrained Systems

Optical wireless communications (OWCs) are power-efficient for providing short-range and high-speed data transmission. In this paper, we propose an interference degradation algorithm for power-constrained OWC systems when using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In this algorithm, we introduce a decision tolerance at the receiver that can be optimally designed to reduce interference caused by peak power clipping distortion and decrease additive noise collected by the photodetectors. Although the recently proposed clipping-enhanced optical OFDM (CEO-OFDM) can transmit clipped information through extra signal frames, reconstructing the received signal introduces more noise. Using the proposed decision tolerance, we can determine whether the signals in the extra frame are required for data reconstruction. By optimally choosing the decision tolerance, the bit error rate (BER) performance is enhanced compared to those of DCO, ACO, and CEO-OFDM. Additionally, the proposed algorithm offers a wider dynamic modulation index range than DCO, ACO, and CEO-OFDM at the same BER. Using the tested parameters, the proposed algorithm with 64-QAM achieves a similar best BER performance as DCO, ACO, and CEO-OFDM using 32-QAM. Therefore, the proposed algorithm achieves a higher data rate than those of the other compared techniques.