A novel signal transmission technique termed subcarrier index-power modulated optical OFDM with superposition multiplexing (SIPM-OOFDM-SPM) is proposed and investigated, for the first time, in which SIPM automatically creates an information-carrying subcarrier power pattern via assigning a high (low) signal modulation format to a high (low) power subcarrier, whilst SPM passively adds different signal modulation format-encoded complex numbers and assigns the sum to a high power subcarrier. In comparison with conventional OOFDM, SIPM and SPM enable extra information to be conveyed in both the new subcarrier index-power dimension and the conventional subcarrier-information-carrying dimension. In this paper, extensive numerical explorations of SIPM-OOFDM-SPM performance characteristics are undertaken, based on which optimum transceiver design parameters are identified. For IMDD PON systems, it is shown that SIPM-OOFDM-SPM considerably improves the signal transmission capacity, link power budget and system performance tolerances to both chromatic dispersion and fiber nonlinearity. Index Terms-Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, coding and decoding, digital signal processing and passive optical networks. I. INTRODUCTION ith the exponential data traffic growth associated with unprecedented emerging bandwidth-hungry network applications and services, recent years have seen extensive research interests in utilizing commercially available 10G-class optics to achieve 25Gb/s/λ intensity-modulation and direct-detection (IMDD) passive optical networks (PONs) equipped with desirable software defined networking (SDN) functionalities such as reconfigurability, flexibility, scalability and elasticity [1]-[3]. To deliver such a challenging task in a cost-effective approach, optical orthogonal frequency division Manuscript received May 22, 2016.