Fiber nonlinearity mitigation by PAPR reduction in coherent optical OFDM systems via biased clipping OFDM

Abstract

A new method incorporating biased clipping orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is presented, which mitigates fiber nonlinear effects in a long-haul coherent optical OFDM (CO-OFDM) system. Under the scheme of the method, the wanted signal carried by odd subcarriers is orthogonal to clipping noise and a Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) performs the optimal OFDM signal up-converter from the radio frequency (RF) domain to the optical domain. Analysis and simulation results show that fiber nonlinear effects can be effectively mitigated by reducing the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) in biased clipping CO-OFDM system. The nonlinearity threshold (NLT) is improved by 5 dB with a reach of 240 km. With a fiber length up to 800 km, system Q value is improved by approximately 2.3, 1.2, and 0.6 dB at a chromatic dispersion of 6, 12, and 16 ps/(nm·km), respectively. Additionally, system Q reaches the maximum when direct currect (DC) bias is equal to the mean value of the OFDM waveform.