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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

Due to the development of smart and portable devices Cyber-Physical

Systems (CPSs) have attracted much attention. By utilizing the wireless
networks to interact among cyber and physical components, CPSs can
improve many smart systems such as smart grid, medical, and traffic control
systems which construct smart society. Although the development of wireless
techniques gives us fascinatingly convenient communication facilities, the
network capacity of the backhaul network will gradually, if not drastically,
diminish as it is not enough to meet the demands of the mobile users, number
of whom has been increasing by leaps and bounds. In order to deal with such
a mass users demands, the optical network is considered by many researchers
to be suitable for the backhaul network because it is capable of providing
stable communication and huge bandwidth. Therefore, the Fiber- Wireless
(FiWi) network which integrates optical networks and wireless access
networks attract more attention for supporting next generation CPSs in a
future ubiquitous network.
Traditionally, optical communications and wireless technologies have
gained rapid progresses respectively along their own paths. The optical fiber
systems could provide extensive high-capacity but cannot reach everywhere,
while the wireless systems could offer ubiquitous coverage but are usually
bandwidth-constrained . Therefore, by integrating the

huge capacity of

optical fiber subsystems with the mobility and ubiquity of wireless

subsystems, fiber-wireless (FiWi) networks are becoming the widely
recognized powerful solution to future high-speed broadband access in the
next decade.

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For the FiWi networks , orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing

(OFDM) has become the prominent transmission scheme due to its
robustness against wireless multipath fading channels as well as the low
complexity implementation. On the other hand, OFDM has recently gained
considerable interest in future high-speed optical fiber networks with the data
rate beyond 100 Gb/s . Also, OFDM is tolerent to optical impairments
including chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion
(PMD) .
However, OFDM suffers from three main drawbacks for FiWi
networks :
1) The reduced spectral efficiency due to the overhead of guard interval,
usually in the form of cyclic prefix (CP), for every OFDM symbol;
2) The high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of OFDM signals makes
FiWi networks sensitive to the nonlinear distortion caused by either the laser
diode or the Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM);
3) The severe sensitivity to the residual carrier frequency offset (CFO) would
cause large inter-carrier-interference (ICI) degrading the system performance.
To improve the spectral efficiency, the length of the guard interval
(e.g., in the form of CP) between adjacent OFDM symbols is reduced in the
reduced-guard-interval OFDM (RGI-OFDM) scheme at the cost of increased
receiver complexity . To reduce the PAPR, clipping or active constellation
extension (ACE) can be used with signal distortion while selected mapping
(SLM) and trellis shaping (TS) without signal distortion would add
redundancy to the original OFDM signals . To mitigate the sensitivity to
CFO, the windowing technique or the polynomial cancellation coding (PCC)
based self-ICI cancellation scheme could be used at the cost of reducing the
transmission efficiency. To solve all of those problems above, in this paper
we propose the flexible multi-block OFDM (MB-OFDM) transmission
scheme for future high speed FiWi networks to simultaneously improve the
spectral efficiency, reduce the PAPR and mitigate the vulnerability to CFO.
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The three main contributions made in this paper are :

1) Unlike the conventional OFDM transmission scheme whereby each
inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) data block has its own guard interval
within every OFDM symbol, the proposed MB-OFDM scheme adopts only
one guard interval in the form of zero padding (ZP) for multiple blocks by
exploiting the slow time-varying property of the fiber-wireless channel .In
this way, the spectral efficiency could be typically improved by about 10%.
2) Every data block within the MB-OFDM transmission frame is further
divided into multiple sub-blocks, whereby each sub-block is generated by an
IFFT of smaller size accordingly. This mechanism makes MB-OFDM a
flexible

compromise

between

the

multi-carrier

and

single-carrier

transmissions, so the PAPR of the MB-OFDM signal could be reduced, and

the sensitivity to CFO could also be alleviated.
3) The hybrid-domain channel equalization is proposed to demodulate the
MB-OFDM signal, whereby the received signal in the form of multi-carrier is
firstly regarded as a single-carrier signal which is recovered in the time
domain, and then the FFT of reduced size is used to restore the transmitted
multi-carrier signal in the frequency domain.

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CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE SURVEY
With the increase in the use of wireless devices bandwidth demand is
increasing day by day. FiWi network which use both wireless as well as
optical network with huge bandwidth can be considered as a solution to the
increasing bandwidth usage. The advantage of using OFDM transmission
technique for FiWi network is studied in the following section.
2.1 REVIEW ON BACKPAPERS
2.1.1

FIBER-WIRELESS

NETWORKS

AND

SUBSYSTEM

TECHNOLOGIES
Hybrid fiber-wireless networks incorporating WDM technology for
fixed wireless access operating in the sub-millimeter- wave and millimeterwave (mm-wave) frequency regions are being actively pursued to provide
unmetered connectivity for ultrahigh bandwidth communications. The
architecture of such radio networks requires a large number of antenna basestations with high throughput to be deployed to maximize the geographical
coverage with the main switching and routing functionalities located in a
centralized location. The transportation of mm-wave wireless signals within
the hybrid network is subject to several impairments including low optoelectronic conversion efficiency, fiber chromatic dispersion and also
degradation due to nonlinearities along the link. One of the major technical

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challenges in implementing such networks lies in the mitigation of these

various optical impairments that the wireless signals experience within the
hybrid network. This paper presents an overview of different techniques to
optically transport mm-wave wireless signals and to overcome impairments
associated with the transport of the wireless signals. This also reviews the
different designs of subsystems for integrating fiber-wireless technology onto
existing optical infrastructure.
Millimeter-wave

(mm-wave)

fiber-wireless

systems

have

the

advantage of being able to exploit the large unused bandwidth in the wireless
spectrum as well as the inherent large bandwidth of the optical fiber. This can
provide high data rates with minimum delay. There are three possible
methods to transport the mm wave wireless signal over the optical link RFover-fiber, IF-over-fiber, and Baseband-over-fiber. Comparing the three
transport schemes, ultimately there is a trade-off between the complexity in
the RF electronic and the optoelectronic interfaces within the base-station.
One of the key challenges in implementing mm-wave fiber-wireless access
systems is to efficiently distribute the wireless signals while maintaining a
functionally simple and compact BS design. Amongst the schemes, RF-overfiber transport scheme has the potential to simplify the BS design for mmwave fiber-wireless systems.
It is well-established that the total capacity and throughput of a mmwave fiber-wireless system can be greatly enhanced with efficient optical
fiber architectures using wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical
networking technology. With the incorporation of WDM in mm-wave fiberwireless approaches, a fast deployment route for these systems may be
achieved. By leveraging the optical network infrastructure already existing in
the access and metro network domains, unused fibers may be utilized as the
means of communications between the CO and the antenna BSs. It is
therefore equally important that mm-wave fiber-wireless access technology
can coexist with other optical access technologies; being able to

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merge/integrate within the existing infrastructure and ensure transparency in

the remote access nodes.
Millimeter-wave fiber-wireless technology has been actively pursued
and investigated in the past two decades. In this paper, we have provided an
overview of the research progress in this area ranging from signal
transportation, impairments to WDM based subsystem interfaces and opticalwireless integrated access infrastructure. In presenting this overview, we have
focused the discussions on techniques and technologies that have been
investigated and demonstrated for the implementation of high-performance
mm-wave fiber-wireless systems.

2.1.2 OFDM FOR OPTICAL COMMUNICATION

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation
technique which is now used in most new and emerging broadband wired and
wireless communication systems because it is an effective solution to inter
symbol interference caused by a dispersive channel. Very recently a number
of researchers
have shown that OFDM is also a promising technology for optical
communications. This paper gives a tutorial overview of OFDM highlighting
the aspects that are likely to be important in optical applications. To achieve
good performance in optical systems OFDM must be adapted in various
ways. The constraints imposed by single mode optical fiber, multimode
optical fiber and optical wireless are discussed and the new forms of optical
OFDM which have been developed are outlined. The main drawbacks of
OFDM are its high peak to average power ratio and its sensitivity to phase
noise and frequency offset. The impairments that these cause are described
and their implications for optical systems discussed.
This paper presents a tutorial introduction to OFDM. A typical OFDM
transmitter and receiver are described and the roles of the main signal
processing blocks explained. The time and frequency domain signals at
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various points in the system are described. It is shown that if a cyclic prefix is
added to each OFDM symbol, any linear distortion introduced by the channel
can be equalized by a single tap equalizer. This process is explained by
considering the effect of a simple two-path channel on the component of the
transmitted signal due to one subcarrier frequency. Throughout the
description particular emphasis is given to those aspects of an OFDM system
that are often misunderstood.
Although the theoretical basis for OFDM was laid several decades
ago, and OFDM became the basis of many communications standards for
wireless and wired applications in the 1990s, it is only very recently that the
application of OFDM
to optical communication has been considered. This is partly because of the
apparent incompatibility between OFDM modulation and conventional
optical systems. A number of forms of OFDM which overcome these
incompatibilities in various ways have been developed for a variety of optical
applications. These are classified into those appropriate for optical wireless
and multimode fiber applications and those for single mode fiber. For the
former, intensity modulation should be used, while for the latter the OFDM
signal should be carried on the field of optical signal. OFDM has a number of
drawbacks including its high peak-to average power ratio and sensitivity to
frequency offset and phase noise. These are described and their likely
implications for optical communications discussed.
In conclusion, OFDM is a very promising technology for optical
communications, but the very different constraints introduced open up many
new interesting avenues for research.
2.1.3 OFDM VERSUS SINGLE CARRIER TRANSMISSION FOR 100
Gbps OPTICAL COMMUNICATION
This paper analyze the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) technique in long-haul next generation optical communication links
and compare it with the well-established single-carrier (SC) data transmission
using high-level modulation formats and coherent detection. The analysis of
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the two alternative solutions is carried out in the 100 Gbps scenario, which is
commonly considered to be the next upgrade of existing optical links, with
special emphasis on quaternary phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulations. The
comparison between OFDM and SC takes into account the main linear and
nonlinear impairments of the optical channel, e.g., group velocity dispersion
(GVD), polarization mode dispersion (PMD), self-phase modulation (SPM),
cross-phase modulation (XPM), and four-wave mixing (FWM), as well as the
phase noise due to transmit and receive lasers, their relative
frequency offset, other synchronization aspects, the overall complexity, the
power and spectral efficiency, and the technological constraints.
OFDM is an effective way to decompose a time-dispersive channel
into a set of independent and parallel sub channels .Hence, when OFDM is
employed and the cyclic prefix is long enough to ensure perfect
compensation of the dispersion a trivial SbS detector can be used for data
detection. This is the reason for the recent widespread use of OFDM in
several wireless communication systems, where, as mentioned, SC
transmissions with SbS detection are not able to achieve channel capacity.
The main advantage of OFDM, which made it a winning technology
for a large number of communication standards like DVB, DSL, WiMax, is
the possibility to match the transmitted signal spectrum to the particular
channel characteristics, like non-flat amplitude responses, due to fading, or
multipath, etc. The effective exploitation of the channel is also possible
through several techniques which improve OFDM efficiency, like bit and
power loading, pulse shaping, channel shortening. All these peculiar features
of OFDM have a lower impact in optical communication, as the channel
amplitude response is almost flat (neglecting minor impairments like
polarization dependent losses and imperfections in the frequency responses
of electrical and optical filters), and the high data rates prevent taking
advantage from sophisticated signal processing.
The main reasons that drive the interest in OFDM are the simple
compensation of linear impairments and the implicit parallelization given by
the IFFT/FFT operations, which lowers the processing speed at the receiver.
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As demonstrated, a proper design of a SC transmission system can provide

the same benefits without incurring in the tight constraints of OFDM in terms
of frequency and phase errors, in its penalty due to nonlinear effects, in its
lack of spectral and energy efficiency, in its difficult implementation due to
technological limits.
A possible advantage of OFDM could be its scalability with higher bit
rates, but, it is almost impossible nowadays to implement a convenient
OFDM system even for 100 Gbps. As a conclusion, there are nowadays
significant technological limits to a cheap and convenient implementation of
OFDM, whereas SC modulations take advantage of a consolidated knowhow and technology, relegating the efforts for realtime implementations only
to the progress in the speed of optical and electronic devices.
2.1.4. PHASE NOISE SUPPRESSION OF OPTICAL OFDM
SIGNALS IN 60-GHz RoF TRANSMISSION SYSTEM
The dispersion-induced phase noise (PN) in an OFDM RoF system at
60 GHz leads to not only subcarrier phase rotation (PRT) but also inter
carrier interference (ICI) to severely degrade the transmission performance,
when a commercial cost-effective DFB laser with the linewidth of several
MHz is adopted. To mitigate both PRT and ICI, a post PN suppression
algorithm is proposed, and it does not require any bandwidth-consuming pilot
tone. For a 25.78-Gbps 16-QAM OFDM RoF signal using the laser with 1.8MHz linewidth, employing the algorithm can extend the maximum
transmission distance which corresponds to 3-dBm power penalty at the BER
of 2x 10^-3 from 75 km to more than 115 km, i.e. 50% increment of
transmission distance.
Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) has been
considered as a prominent format for a variety of digital communication
systems owing to its robustness against frequency selective fading and intersymbol interference caused by both multipath in air-link and chromatic
dispersion in optical fibers . Besides, highly spectral efficiency and flexibility

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of OFDM makes it attractive for narrowband applications (i.e. 7-GHz

license-free band at 60 GHz) beyond the 10-Gb/s regime. However, an
OFDM signal is very sensitive to PN which will destroy the orthogonality
among subcarriers. Hence, the dispersion-induced PN from nonzero laser
linewidth causes not only phase rotation (PRT) on each subcarrier but also
intercarrier interference (ICI) among subcarrier to greatly reduce the fiber
transmission distance. In particular, due to the increasing interest in optically
amplified long-reach passive optical networks (PONs) , the required reach of
a hybrid RoF/PON system which is expected to provide various services is
up to 100 km.
In this work, by simplifying the profile of dispersion, use the
algorithm from the area of wireless communication to estimate and suppress
both PRT and ICI. The proposed PN suppression (PNS) algorithm does not
require any bandwidth-consuming pilot tones to allow full utilization of 7GHz unlicensed band at 60 GHz. Experimental results show that the
algorithm can suppress the performance degradation caused by dispersioninduced PN to extend the transmission distance and/or to reduce the
requirement of laser linewidth. Employing the algorithm, the 25.78-Gbps 16QAM OFDM signals at 60 GHz can reach the BER of 2 X10^-3 after 100-km
transmission, and the extension of transmission distance is more than 40 km
using the laser with 1.3 or 1.8-MHz linewidth.
2.1.5

FIBER

NON-LINEARITY

MITIGATION

BY

PAPR

REDUCTION IN COHERENT OPTICAL OFDM SYSTEMS VIA

ACTIVE CONSTELLATION EXTENSION
Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has become a
state-of-the-art technology in wireless communications over the last 10 years,
and more recently has been proposed in optical systems. Coherent optical
OFDM (CO-OFDM) has been demonstrated to combat fiber chromatic
dispersion and polarization-mode dispersion using the robust equalization
that is a major advantage of OFDM systems.One of the disadvantages of
OFDM is a high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) due to a central limit

10

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theorem effect when modulating many symbols via an IFFT. In COOFDM

systems, the PAPR problem increases the presence of nonlinear effects,
which are proportional to the instantaneous signal power . This paper
consider active constellation extension (ACE), an intelligent PAPR reduction
algorithm we first introduced for wireless OFDM, to mitigate nonlinear
effects. This paper demonstrates its effectiveness through simulation, and
with such a scheme and find that the nonlinearity threshold is improved by
1.5 dB and 0.8 dB, respectively, at a reach of 400 km and 1040 km. This
nonlinearity threshold enhancement is directly translated into OSNR margin
improvement.
Many techniques exist to reduce the PAPR of an OFDM symbol, with
the most basic being to simply clip the signal. This results in distortion which
moves
constellation points from their original locations, and for a majority of
symbols, causes the symbol to move closer to other constellation points,
resulting in an increased BER.Assume the upper-right constellation point is
to be transmitted on some OFDM subcarrier. If extending that point
anywhere into the semi-infinite grey region reduces the PAPR, then we have
reduced the peak power while not increasing the BER. In fact, extending
outwards reduces the BER for that symbol (along with an associated increase
in the OFDM symbol average power). This is the main idea of ACE: reduce
the PAPR by maintaining the minimum distance between constellation points
and only allowing extension away from the maximum-likelihood decision
boundaries. This results in a convex optimization problem, in which a
suboptimal solution is obtained using an efficient smart gradient-project
approach. A main advantage of the ACE algorithm is that it does not modify
the symbol decision regions, and thus does not require extra overhead for
OFDM reception, nor does it need any transmitted side-information like
many PAPR techniques require .

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CHAPTER 3
METHODOLOGY
In this section, the system architecture of the FiWi networks is rstly
outlined, and then the proposed MB-OFDM frame structure for FiWi
networks is addressed in detail. Finally, the signal model over the berwireless channels is presented.
3.1 FiWi SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

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Overall system architecture of the FiWi networks integrating the ber

subsystems and the wireless subsystems is shown in Fig. 1. The wireless base
stations and access points in wireless radio subsystems could provide
ubiquitous and mobile access for end users, while the ber subsystem could
offer very high throughput by exploiting the central ofces (CO) to
interconnect all the wireless base stations and access points. In addition, most
high-complexity processing originally implemented in the wireless base
stations and access points can be shifted to the central ofces, thus more
dense wireless antennas could be deployed with low cost, and obviously
increased data rate and enhanced coverage are expected for future high-speed
FiWi networks.

Fig 1 : System architecture of the FiWi network

3.2 PROPOSED MB-OFDM FRAME STRUCTURE

The frame structure comparison between the conventional OFDM and
the proposed MB-OFDM schemes for FiWi networks is illustrated in Fig. 2.

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Fig 2 : Time-domain frame structure comparison: (a) The conventional

OFDM scheme; (b) The proposed MB-OFDM scheme.
As shown in Fig. 2 (a), the transmission frame for most existing
OFDM-based FiWi networks is composed of one preamble used for joint
timing/frequency synchronization and channel estimation, and the following
S payload OFDM symbols using the CP of length M as the guard interval of
the IFFT data block of length N. Since the ber-wireless channel is varying
slowly, the channel information obtained during the preamble could be used
to demodulate the following S OFDM symbols. For the m th OFDM symbol,
the time-domain IFFT data block

d m=[d m ,0 , d m ,1 , , d m , N1 ]

by applying the N-point IFFT

~ ~ ~ ~T
d m =[ d m , 0 , d m ,1 , , d m, N 1] as

to

N 1

m , n=

d m .k e
~

the

2 nk
N

generated

frequency-domain

, m=0,1, . , S1

data

(1)

N k=0

On the contrary, as shown in Fig. 2 (b), the proposed MB-OFDM

transmission frame is composed of one preamble and the following two parts:
1)

One super-block data

d=[ d T0 , d T1 , , d TS1 ]T

comprising S data blocks

{d m }S1
m=0

of length SN

without guard interval

(e.g., CP in most OFDM systems) among them. The mth data

block

d m=[d Tm ,0 , d Tm ,1 , , d Tm ,G 1]T

14

is further divided into G

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sub- blocks
2)

G1

{d m ,g }g=0

, and each sub-block of length

'

= N/G is generated by N ' -point IFFT;

One ZP z = 0M1, which is used as the guard interval of the
super-block data d. Essentially, the super-block data d and the
following ZP z form a virtual" ZP-OFDM symbol, whereby
the data part is composed of S blocks corresponding to the S
IFFT data blocks of the conventional OFDM symbols (here, we
use the term virtual" to distinguish the proposed frame
structure from the standard ZP-OFDM signal structure,
whereby every IFFT data block has a ZP as the guard interval) .

Fig 3 : Transmitter architecture comparison: (a) The conventional OFDM

scheme; (b) The proposed MB-OFDM scheme.
The preamble we have used here could achieve accurate timing and
frequency synchronization due to the specially designed time-domain
structure, and it can also be used for channel estimation. Normally, the length
of the preamble is the same as that of a normal OFDM symbol.
The rst key difference between the proposed MB-OFDM scheme and
the conventional one is the guard interval. Traditionally, each OFDM symbol

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has its own CP (or ZP in ZP- OFDM systems) as the guard interval, and there
are totally S CPs as shown in Fig. 2 (a). Since the length of guard interval is
usually large enough to combat the composite effects of wireless multipath as
well as optical CD and PMD in FiWi networks the frequently inserted CPs
obviously reduce the spectral efciency. However, the proposed scheme
utilizes only one ZP as the guard interval for all of the S data blocks. The
only one guard interval instead of S guard intervals could also be efciently
used for reliable data demodulation, thus the proposed MB-OFDM scheme
could achieve higher spectral efciency.
The second obvious difference between the proposed MB- OFDM
solution and the conventional one lies in the way to generate the time-domain
payload data. As illustrated in Fig. 2 and further explained in Fig. 3, the g th
sub-block

d m , g=[d m , g ,0 , d m , g ,1 , , dm ,g , N '1 ]

mth data block dm is generated by applying the

(g =0 ,1,,G1) with in the

N ' point IFFT ( N '

N/G)
to
the
corresponding
frequency-domain
~ ~~ ~T
d m , g=[ d m , g ,0 , d m , g ,1 , , d m , g ,N 1 ] as below :
N1

m , g ,n =

j
dm. g , k e
~

2 nk
N'

, n=0,1, . , N '1

=
data

(2)

N ' k=0

Note that the G N/G-point IFFTs in Fig. 3(b) can be actually

implemented by a single N/G-point IFFT for G times to generate G sub-block
G1

{d m ,g }g=0

Fig. 4 compares the frequency-domain signal structure of the

proposed MB-OFDM with the conventional OFDM schemes with the same
signal bandwidth B. For the conventional OFDM system where each timedomain IFFT data block is generated by N-point IFFT, the subcarrier-spacing
f as shown in Fig. 4(a) should be

1
1
B
f= =
=
T N Ts N '
16

(3)

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where T is the duration of the corresponding time-domain IFFT data block,

Ts is the baseband sampling period, and B =1/Ts is the signal bandwidth.
However, without changing the signal bandwidth (and the baseband sampling
period as well), the proposed MB-OFDM scheme generates each sub block
by the

N ' -point IFFT ( N ' = N/G), so the subcarrier- spacing

f'

as shown in Fig. 4(b) becomes

f '=
where T ' =

1
1
B
= ' T = ' =G f
'
T N
N
s

(4)

N ' Ts is the duration of the corresponding sub-block in the

time domain. It is clear that the subcarrier spacing f ' would be enlarged
when the smaller IFFT size

N ' is used.

Fig 4 : Comparison of frequency-domain signal structure: (a) The conventional OFDM with the N-point IFFT; (b) The proposed MB-OFDM with the
N-point IFFT.
In conventional OFDM-based FiWi networks, the IFFT size is usually
congured large to keep the overhead caused by the frequently inserted CPs
within a certain degree, so the resulting subcarrier spacing is usually much
smaller than the system coherent bandwidth . Therefore, it is possible to
reduce the IFFT size to some extent without sacricing the system
performance. However,

N ' could not be too small. In the extreme case of

N ' =1, the proposed MB-OFDM scheme becomes the single-carrier

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transmission, and the merits of multi-carrier transmission would vanish.

Therefore, the proposed MB-OFDM scheme provides a exible compromise
between the conventional OFDM multi-carrier and single- carrier
transmissions by conguring the appropriate parameter

N ' according to

the system requirements.

The design of using smaller IFFT size

N ' does not sacrice the

spectral efciency since multiple data blocks in MB-OFDM share only one
guard interval. On the contrary, a conventional OFDM system usually adopts
the relatively large IFFT size N because it requires every IFFT block to have
its own guard interval. The direct reason of using the reduced IFFT size to
generate the time-domain sub-blocks in MB-OFDM is to reduce the PAPR
and alleviate the sensitivity to residual CFO of OFDM signals.
3.3 CHANNEL MODEL FOR FIBER-WIRELESS SYSTEMS
After the ber-wireless channel, the received data

r=[r 0 ,r 1 , , r SN1 ]

corresponding to the transmitted super- block data d should be

r

L 1

n= hl dnl + wn , n=0,1, ,SN1

(5)

l=0

where dnl is the (nl)th entry of the super-block data d as shown in Fig. 3,
h=[h0 , h1 , , h L1 ]T

is the time-domain channel impulse response (CIR)

of the ber-wireless link, hl denotes the gain of the lth path including the
wireless multi- path effect as well as the optical impairment effects like CD,
PMD, and polarization dependent loss (PDL) , L denotes the channel length,
wn presents the additive white Gussian noise (AWGN) caused by the optical
amplied spontaneous emission (ASE) and electronic noise. Note that the ZP
length M should be larger than the channel length L to avoid the interferences
between adjacent transmission frames.
3.4 RECEIVER DESIGN

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The receiver architecture of the proposed MB-OFDM transmission

scheme is shown in Fig 5. After ber-wireless front end and analog-to-digital
(A/D) conversion, the preamble is used for joint timing and frequency
synchronization, and it can also be used for channel estimation . Then, we
propose the hybrid-domain channel equalization to remove the ber-wireless
channel impairments. Finally, constellation demapping and channel decoding
are used to recover the transmitted signal.
Motivated by the fact that the MB-OFDM scheme actually unies the
modeling of the multi-carrier and single- carrier transmissions, we propose
the hybrid-domain channel equalization of the MB-OFDM signal as
illustrated by the dashed block of Fig. 5. Unlike the classical frequencydomain equalization (FDE) where one N-point FFT is applied to obtain the
frequency-domain data for each OFDM symbol, the proposed hybrid-domain
channel equalization is composed of the time-domain signal detection with a
pair of SN-point FFT/IFFT and then the frequency-domain signal recovery
with SG

N
G

point FFTs.

Fig 5 : Receiver architecture of the proposed MB-OFDM scheme with

reduced IFFT size and guard interval.

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The slow time-varying property of channel in FiWi networks will be

exploited to achieve the cyclicity reconstruction of the received virtual" ZPOFDM symbol of large size by extending the classical overlap and add
(OLA) algorithm used for a single standard ZP-OFDM symbol of small size.
The OLA algorithm simply adds the tail" caused by the multipath effect in
the ZP, to the front part of the received super-block data r of length SN, so the
obtained dat

r ' =[r 0' , r 1' , , r SN1' ]T

actually becomes

the

cyclic

convolution between the transmitted super-block data d and the CIR h as

'

(6)

r =d h+w

where w denotes the AWGN vector. Therefore, ZP in the proposed MBOFDM acts similarly to the CP in conventional OFDM, whereby the cyclicity
reconstruction could be achieved by directly removing the CP. Second, a pair
of SN-point FFT/IFFT is used to recover the time-domain transmitted superblock data d after compensating for the ber-wireless channel impairments in
the frequency domain. The SN-point FFT is applied to the time- domain
signal r ' in (6) to produce the frequency-domain signal r '
~
~r ' =F r ' =F ( d h+ w ) =~
d h+~
w
SN

where

F SN d

the direct stacking of

F SN h

is the FFT output of d (note that

S 1

{dm }m=0

(7)

SN

distinguishes

since different IFFT sizes are used), h

,denotes the channel frequency response (CFR) corresponding to

the CIR h, and

F SN w

denotes the frequency-domain AWGN.

Then, the time-domain transmitted super-block data d could be recovered as

^
^
H ~
H ~' ~
^
d=F
SN d=F SN r / h
where

(8)

~^ is obtained by the preamble-based channel estimation . From (8)

h

we can nd that the inter-symbol interference caused by the multipath

channel effect over the entire super-block d has been compensated for.
Third, as illustrated in Fig. 6, the recovered time-domain super-block
data

d^ is divided into SG length-N/ G sub-blocks according to the frame

20

SNGCE, ECE DEPT

structure at the transmitter, and then SG

N
-point FFTs are used to restore
G

the transmitted signal in the frequency domain.

CHAPTER 4
PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
The performance analysis of the proposed MB-OFDM transmission
scheme in terms of spectral efciency, PAPR reduction, and the
computational complexity is done. The potential extensions of the proposed
scheme are also discussed.
4.1 SPECTRAL EFFICIENCY
Due to the overhead caused by the preamble, especially the guard
intervals, the spectral efciency of the OFDM based FiWi networks
normalized by the ideal case without any overhead can be expressed in the
percentage form as

0=

SN
100 (9)
SN + KM+ N P

where K is the number of guard intervals used in the transmission frame, so

K = S for the conventional OFDM scheme while K =1 for the proposed MBOFDM scheme,
N P =M + N

NP

denotes the preamble length, and usually

is adopted.

Table I compares the spectral efciency between the conventional and

proposed OFDM schemes for FiWi networks, whereby the typical values N =
21

SNGCE, ECE DEPT

256,M = 32are used for both schemes. It is clear that about 10% higher
spectral efciency could be achieved by the proposed scheme due to the
removal of (S 1) guard intervals.
TABLE 1
COMPARISON OF SPECTRAL EFFICIENCY

4.2 PAPR REDUCTION

It is highly desired to reduce the PAPR of OFDM signals in FiWi
networks, since PAPR is the main source of nonlinear effect in those systems.
The PAPR of the OFDM signal generated by a N-point IFFT is dened as
2

PAPR ( dB ) =10 log 10

max {|d m ,n| }

2

E {|d m ,n| }

Since the input frequency-domain data

N1

{d m ,k }k=0

(10)
are random, the maximal

PAPR could be as large as PAPR max = 10log10N in the worst case that all the
data

N1

{d m. k }k=0

are added in phase during the IFFT process to generate the

corresponding time-domain signal

N 1

{d m , k }k=0

. Such extreme case seldom

appears in practice, so the widely used metric for evaluating PAPR is the
complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) Fc(), which is
dened as the probability that the PAPR is larger than a given threshold . It
has been proved that
Fc() = Pr(PAPR >)=1Pr(PAPR ) = 1(1e ) N ,
(11)
which indicates that the CCDF is only dependent on the IFFT size N for a
given threshold . Thus, the smaller IFFT size

22

N'

= N/G in the proposed

SNGCE, ECE DEPT

MB-OFDM scheme would result in lower CCDF of the PAPR. It is worth

noting that the improvement of PAPR by reducing the IFFT size has no
penalty of signal distortion or bandwidth extension as the existing PAPR
reduction techniques.
The PAPR reduction due to smaller IFFT size

N'

could also be

intuitively explained by the fact that the proposed MB- OFDM is essentially
a compromise between the multi-carrier and signal-carrier transmission
schemes, whereby multi-carrier signal has high PAPR while single-carrier
signal enjoys low PARR.
4.3 COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY
At the transmitter side, Fig. 3 indicates that the proposed scheme
utilizes SG N/G point IFFTs instead of SN-point IFFTs to generate the time
domain data. Considering the complexity of a N-point IFFT in terms of the
number of multiplications is
has the complexity of SG

N
log2N, the proposed MB-OFDM scheme
2

N
N
SN
log2(
)=
G
G
2

log2(

N
), instead of
G

SN
log2N for the conventional OFDM scheme. Clearly, a computation
2
reduction of

SN
log2G could be achieved.
2

At the receiver side, the hybrid-domain channel equalization requires

a simple addition for OLA-based cyclicity reconstruction, a pair of SN-point
FFT/IFFT for single-carrier signal demodulation, and SG

N
point FFTs for
G

multi-carrier signal recovery. By contrast, the conventional OFDM scheme

only needs S N-point FFTs to produce the frequency-domain signals for the S
length-N IFFT data blocks (note that the preamble-based channel estimate
could be used to demodulate all S OFDM symbols). Therefore, the receiver

23

SNGCE, ECE DEPT

of the proposed MB-OFDM needs SN log2

SN
G

more times of

multiplications than the conventional OFDM. However, since FFT/IFFT

could be efciently realized by powerful modern digital processors, the
increased complexity is affordable, especially for the proposed scheme
having higher spectral efciency, reduced PAPR, and alleviated sensitivity to
the residual CFO.

CHAPTER 5
SIMULATION RESULTS
This section provides simulation results to evaluate the performance of
the proposed MB-OFDM transmission scheme for future high-speed FiWi
networks. In the simulation, we choose the LDPC code due to its low
complexity and very low error oor resulted from the absence of 4-cycles in
its graph. A 2.5 Gbps random data stream is coded by LDPC, and then 16
QAM modulation is adopted for constellation mapping. The constellation
24

SNGCE, ECE DEPT

signal is used to generate the MB-OFDM transmission frame with the

parameters N = 256,M = N/8 = 32 ,S = 10 ,G =8. The obtained OFDM signal
is up-converted to 5.65 GHz , which is then used to modulate the continuouswave external cavity laser (ELC) with the linewidth of 100 kHz at MZM.
After that, the erbium-doped ber amplier (EDFA) is used to boost the
optical OFDM signal, and the optical lter with 0.8 nm bandwidth is used to
lter out the outband noise. After the transmission through a 20 km singlemode ber (SMF) with the attenuation of 0.2 dB/km, the optical CD of 40
ps/nm/km and the PMD with the mean differential group delay of 50 ps, a 10
GHz bandwidth photodiode (PD) is used to convert the optical OFDM signal
into radio frequency signal. At the wireless receiver which is 5 m away from
the wireless transmitter, a 20 dB gain low-noise amplier (LNA) is followed
by a 40 GSa/s analog-to-digital convertor (ADC) to capture the wireless
OFDM signal, and then the digital receiver algorithms as detailed in Chapter
3 are used for signal recovery. The sum-product algorithm (SPA) for LDPC
decoding is adopted for iterative soft-decision decoding with the iteration
number of 50. The Indoor A channel model dened by ITU is used to emulate
the wireless multipath channel, and the received OSNR is dened with the
0.1 nm noise bandwidth.
Fig. 6 shows the CCDF of the PAPR when different IFFT sizes are
used. When N = 256, the IFFT size in conventional OFDM transmission
scheme is 256. However, the proposed MB-OFDM scheme could adopt
obviously reduced IFFT size
blocks of length

N ' = N/G to generate the corresponding sub-

N ' as

25

SNGCE, ECE DEPT

Fig 6 : CCDF of the PAPR when different IFFT sizes are used.
shown in Figs. 2 and 3. The theoretical CCDF (11) is also included in Fig. 7
as the benchmark for comparison. It is clear that the reduced IFFT size

N'

could lead to the PAPR reduction, e.g., for the clipping ratio of 0.01, the
PAPR is reduced by 1.2 dB and 1.9 dB when

N ' = 32and

N ' = 16

respectively. We could also observe that the simulated CCDF coincides with
the theoretical result (11).

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SNGCE, ECE DEPT

CONCLUSION
In this paper, the multi-block OFDM (MB-OFDM) transmission
scheme is proposed for high-speed FiWi networks to simultaneously achieve
improved spectral efciency, reduced PAPR and mitigated sensitivity to CFO.
One key idea is that the slow time-varying property of the ber-wireless
channel can be utilized to improve the spectral efciency, which is achieved
by sharing one guard interval among multiple data blocks.. The above merits,
which have been demonstrated by the simulation results, are achieved at the
cost of increased yet affordable receiver complexity. The proposed scheme
could also be easily extended to other ber/wireless/FiWi networks. The
future work is to incorporate the proposed scheme with wireless multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) and optical polarization division multiplexing
(PDM) techniques to further improve the system capacity and reliability.

FUTURE WORKS
The proposed MB-OFDM scheme, or at least some key components of
this scheme, can be directly used or easily extended to other OFDM-based
wireless and optical communication systems.

27

SNGCE, ECE DEPT

First, the MB-OFDM scheme is also valid when CP instead of ZP is

used as the guard interval in ber/wireless/FiWi networks with the simple
modication: replace ZP with CP and put the CP in front of the super-block
data. As a result, the cyclicity reconstruction via OLA is not necessary any
more, but other procedures at the transmitter and receiver remain unchanged.
Thus, higher spectral efciency, reduced PAPR and mitigated vulnerability to
CFO could still be achieved.
Second, single-carrier transmission could also be used for FiWi
networks, and the proposed MB-OFDM scheme becomes a single-carrier
solution when G = N (i.e.,

N'

= 1). Thus, the idea of using only one guard

interval for multiple data blocks can be also used by single-carrier systems to
achieve higher spectral efciency.
Third, for some applications, especially for wireless communication
systems, the channel may change very fast, then it is preferred to reduce the
number of data blocks within a super-block to combat the fast channel
variation. In the extreme case, S =1could be congured without improving
the spectral efciency. However, the smaller IFFT size used in the proposed
MB-OFDM scheme could still be used to reduce the PAPR and mitigate the
sensitivity to the residual CFO.

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