Bilal Ranjha and Mohsen Kavehrad
387
Hybrid Asymmetrically Clipped
OFDM-Based IM/DD Optical
Wireless System
Bilal Ranjha and Mohsen Kavehrad
AbstractIn this paper, we present a hybrid asymmetri-
cally clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multi-
plexing (OFDM) system. This system uses a combination
of asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM)
and pulse amplitude modulated discrete multitone
(PAM-DMT) techniques, which can be used in intensity
modulated direct detection (IM/DD) optical wireless
(OW) systems. In this hybrid scheme, ACO-OFDM and
PAM-DMT signals are transmitted together. Clipping noise
is estimated at the receiver and canceled to recover the
PAM-DMT symbols. This scheme does not require any DC
bias for transmission, which makes the transmitter less
complex and very power efficient. With this system, we
can increase the data rate of the ACO-OFDM system by al-
most twice. In addition, no bandwidth penalty is incurred.
Extensive computer simulations show that the bit-error
rate (BER) performance of ACO-OFDM in the additive
white Gaussian noise environment is not affected by any
kind of interference, but only due to half of the available
transmit power, we see a 3 dB degradation. However, the
BER performance of PAM-DMT shows some degradation
at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) but is identical to the
conventional scheme at higher SNR. We also see a slight
improvement in peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of
the output combined signal. Therefore, advantages such
as increased data rate, DC-bias elimination, no bandwidth,
and PAPR penalty make this scheme very attractive for OW
systems using IM/DD.
Index TermsACO-OFDM; DC bias; OFDM; Optical
wireless; PAM-DMT; PAPR.
I. INTRODUCTION
R ecent advances in digital signal processing (DSP)
technology and the availability of high-speed signal
processors has enabled the wireless industry to use effi-
cient signaling schemes that can combat multipath
dispersion in an outdoor multipath wireless channel.
The addition of multiple copies of the same signal at differ-
ent times due to multipath causes frequency-selective fad-
ing and inter-symbol interference (ISI), which severely
degrades system performance [1,2]. Orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing (OFDM) is one of the popular
Manuscript received November 18, 2013; revised February 8, 2014; ac-
cepted February 10, 2014; published March 20, 2014 (Doc. ID 201565).
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering,
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802,
USA (e-mail: bar5254@psu.edu).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/JOCN.6.000387
1943-0620/14/040387-10$15.00/0
VOL. 6, NO. 4/APRIL 2014/J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW.
physical layer schemes used in a range of modern radio
frequency (RF) mobile wireless communication system
standards such as WiFi, WiMax, and LTE, due to its ability
to counter multipath fading and ISI using easy equaliza-
tion techniques.
OFDM is also being considered as a candidate for indoor
optical wireless (OW) systems especially in intensity modu-
lated direct detection (IM/DD) systems, and has gained sig-
nificant attention because of the multipath nature of the
indoor OW channel [36]. Multipath in an indoor environ-
ment causes overlapping of light signals and results in
signal distortion [7,8]. This severely degrades system per-
formance. In RF-based OFDM systems, the output signal
is bipolar and complex. This signal cannot be easily
transmitted in an IM/DD-based OW system since light
intensity cannot be negative and we cannot transmit a
complex signal using a single optical transmitter such as
an LED [9]. Therefore, the output OFDM signal has to
be made real and positive to make it suitable for optical
transmission. Hermitian symmetric input data to the
OFDM block generates a real output signal. However, to
make the signal positive, several OFDM schemes have
been proposed for IM/DD OW systems. Among them, one
is called DC-biased OFDM [10], wherein we use a DC bias
to make the output signal positive. Other schemes involve
clipping the negative part of the output signal. Pulse am-
plitude modulated discrete multitone (PAM-DMT) [11] is
one of these clipping-based schemes where we modulate
the imaginary part of each subcarrier while the real part
is set to zero. The output bipolar signal is clipped, and clip-
ping noise will fall on the real part of the same subcarrier.
Another clipping-based scheme known as asymmetrically
clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) uses only odd subcar-
riers modulated by complex constellation symbols [12,13].
This will result in clipping noise falling only on even
subcarriers. Therefore, in both clipping-based strategies,
clipping noise is always orthogonal to the transmitted
symbols, which will enable easy recovery of the desired
data at the receiver.
In ACO-OFDM, we only use half of the subcarriers,
which is spectrally a very inefficient strategy. To increase
the data rate and improve spectral efficiency, we propose
using a hybrid scheme that uses a combination of both
ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT. In [14], it was shown that
we can regenerate clipping noise at the receiver, which
can be used to cancel the clipping noise falling on even
2014 Optical Society of America
388 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 6, NO. 4/APRIL 2014 Bilal Ranjha and Mohsen Kavehrad

subcarriers. This will enable us to use even subcarriers for
data transfer, which will improve spectral efficiency.
We propose using PAM-DMT to modulate the imaginary
part of each even subcarrier by symbols drawn from a real
one-dimensional (1D) constellation such as M-ary pulse
amplitude modulation (M-PAM). Both signals have to be
generated on two different paths and finally added to-
gether after clipping their negative parts. No DC-bias ad-
dition is required at the transmitter, which will make the
transmitter simple. However, since we will be transmitting
a combination of both ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT signal,
only half of the power will be available to the ACO-OFDM
signal. This will incur 3 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
degradation at the receiver and thus bit-error rate
(BER) performance deterioration. This combination of
ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT offers advantages such as zero
DC-bias addition, higher data rates, reduced transmitter
complexity, and no increase in peak-to-average power ratio
(PAPR) of the output signal. These features will definitely
make this scheme very attractive for future OW systems.
In [15] a similar technique has been proposed, which
uses a DC-bias OFDM on the second path of the transmit-
ter and a two-dimensional (2D) constellation mapping.
As shown in [16], DC-bias addition is not a very power ef-
ficient strategy. Therefore, in our proposed scheme we try
to reduce transmitter complexity by using a 1D constella-
tion and improve power efficiency by eliminating DC bias.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II gives an over-
view of both clipping-based systems, namely ACO-OFDM
and PAM-DMT, along with a description of system blocks.
It also presents a detailed system diagram of the proposed
hybrid system, hybrid asymmetrically clipped optical
(HACO)-OFDM, with a description of each block and a def-
inition of generated signals. Section III provides detailed
derivation of the probability density function (PDF) of the
HACO-OFDM output signal. In Section V, we present the
system performance results. Extensive computer simula-
tions were carried out to compute the BER performance of
the whole system in the additive white Gaussian noise
(AWGN) channel. We also computed the PAPR performance
of individual systems and the combined system and com-
pared our results. We finally conclude with Section VI.
II. CLIPPING-BASED OW IM/DD SYSTEMS
In this section, we provide a review of two clipping-based
strategies that form an integral part of the proposed hybrid
system. Specifically we will describe the ACO-OFDM and
PAM-DMT systems.
A. ACO-OFDM
A simple block diagram of a baseband ACO-OFDM sys-
tem is shown in Fig. 1. In this OFDM-based system, data
are transmitted in the form of blocks of duration T. Each
block consists of M
N4 complex symbols drawn from a
complex 2D constellation such as 4-, 16-, or 64-QAM that
will modulate only odd subcarriers in the first half of N
subcarriers. N is the total number of subcarriers available
and is equal to the size of the inverse fast Fourier transform
(IFFT). The conjugate of these symbols modulates the
odd subcarriers of the second half of N subcarriers to meet
the Hermitian symmetry requirements. Therefore, the
input data vector to the IFFT block will look like X

0; X 0 ; 0; X 1 ; 0; ; X N21 ; 0; X N21 ; 0; ; X 0 , where X k

ak  ibk and ak ; bk are real and imaginary parts of the
complex symbol, respectively. The first (DC) and N2nd
subcarriers are set to zero to obtain a real output signal.
The time-domain output signal is generated by taking
the IFFT of the input vector:

ACO_OFDM
QAM
symbols
IFFT
S/P (N-point)
Mapping Add
Input Clip
/ Zero Cyclic D/A
Bits P/S negative
Insertion Prefix Converter
part
S/P (CP)
PAM
Conj()
symbols
PAM-DMT

AWGN
w (t )
ACO_OFDM
FFT
+
P/S
Extract (N-point)
symbols Remove
Output Cyclic A/D
S/P
Bits Prefix Converter
Extract (CP)
P/S symbols

PAM-DMT

Fig. 1. Block diagram of baseband ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT systems.

Bilal Ranjha and Mohsen Kavehrad VOL. 6, NO. 4/APRIL 2014/J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW. 389

1XN1 2 3
 
2 4 X
k
xn
X ej2Nn : (1) N21
k
N k
0 k ym
Ns
bk sin 2 N s 5
N k
0
N
A cyclic prefix (CP) is added to this discrete time output
2 3
signal. xn is bipolar and antisymmetric. We clip the  
24X
N21
k 5
negative part of this signal to generate a unipolar signal
b sin 2 s
N k
0 k N
given by xn c :


ym ; s
0; 1; 2; ; N 1: (5)
xn if xn 0
xn c
: (2)
0 if xn < 0 We can easily clip the negative part of ym without losing
any information. Therefore, after adding a CP to the IFFT
xn c is finally passed through a digital-to-analog (D/A) output, the negative half of the signal is clipped. The clip-
converter to generate a continuous time signal that modu- ping noise is found to be falling on the real part of each sub-
lates the intensity of an optical transmitter such as an LED carrier. Therefore, because of the orthogonality of clipping
[9]. The clipping noise generated by clipping the negative noise, transmitted symbols remain uncorrupted by the
half of the time-domain signal falls only on even subcar- noise and can be recovered easily at the receiver.
riers. Therefore, the transmitted symbols are not affected
The asymmetric clipping operation is the same as de-
by the clipping noise, which enables easy recovery of data
fined in Eq. (2). This clipped output yn c is passed through
symbols at the receiver.
a D/A converter to generate a continuous time signal that
At the receiver, an optical detector converts the intensity finally modulates the intensity of the optical modulator.
into an electrical signal x~ t. This signal gets corrupted by
At the receiver side, we perform the reverse operations
electronic noise generated by electronic components and
in a similar fashion to that of ACO-OFDM to extract
the ambient noise from the surrounding light sources. This
useful data. The only difference is that at the output of
noise wt is usually modeled as AWGN. The noise cor-
FFT block, we only extract the imaginary part of the first
rupted signal is then passed through an analog-to-digital
N2 subcarriers.
(A/D) converter to generate a discrete time signal x~ n :
The received signal at a specific subcarrier in the
x~ n
xn c  wn ; (3) absence of any external noise or disturbance is given by

where wn is the discrete time version of AWGN. The CP is X

N21 X
N21
ym c ej2N m  yNm c ej2NNm
k k
removed and finally we perform FFT operation on the input Yk

m
0 m
0
discrete time samples. The noise corrupted constellation
symbols are extracted from the FFT output and demapped X

N21 
ym c ej2Nm  ym c ej2N m
k k

to generate output bits.

m
0

X

N21  
k

B. PAM-DMT
ym c  ym c cos 2 m
m
0
N
   
k
The block diagram of the PAM-DMT system is similar to i ym c ym c sin 2 m
N
that of ACO-OFDM shown in Fig. 1. In this OFDM-based
scheme, N2 symbols drawn from a real mapping scheme X

N21 
k
 
k

such as PAM are used to modulate the imaginary part of
jym j cos 2 m iym  sin 2 m : (6)
m
0
N N
each subcarrier. However, the DC and N2nd subcarriers
are not modulated to fulfill the Hermitian symmetry re- From Eq. (6), we observe that clipping noise falls on the
quirements. Therefore, the data vector forming the input real part of each subcarrier and it actually represents the
to the IFFT block will be Y
0; Y 0 ; Y 1 ; Y 2 ; ; Y N21 ; 0; absolute value of the transmitted time-domain signal. This
Y N21 ; ; Y 1 ; Y 0 , where Y k
ibk and bk is the real- valuable information, as shown in [14], can be used to
valued symbol drawn from a constellation such as improve the overall SNR by a few decibels with some
M-PAM. The real part of each subcarrier is set to zero. additional signal processing.
The time-domain real output signal ym is generated by
taking the IFFT of the input vector:
C. Hybrid ACO-OFDM
X
1 N1 k
ym
Y ej2Nm m
0; 1; 2; ; N 1
N k
0 k
We propose a hybrid asymmetrically clipped scheme that
N21  
2 X k is a combination of ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT. A simple

bk sin 2 m : (4) block diagram of the baseband HACO-OFDM system is
N k
0 N
shown in Fig. 2. In this scheme, we generate two separate
ym is an antisymmetric signal and has the same blocks of asymmetrically clipped OFDM signal of duration
information in both the positive and negative parts. T and then combine them together to transmit as a single
Mathematically, block. To generate the first block, input data bits are
390 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 6, NO. 4/APRIL 2014 Bilal Ranjha and Mohsen Kavehrad

mapped using a 2D mapping scheme such as M-QAM to
obtain M
N4 input symbols that modulate odd subcar-
riers in the OFDM block. The remaining subcarriers are set
to zeros. The input vector to the IFFT block takes the form
XACO
0; X 0 ; 0; X 1 ; 0; ; X N21 ; 0; X N21 ; 0; ; X 0 . The
time-domain output signal xACO;m is asymmetrically
clipped xACO;m c , which will generate clipping noise/
interference I ACO on even subcarriers.
A second stream of input data bits is mapped using a 1D
constellation such as M-PAM to generate M 1 PAM sym-
bols that will modulate the imaginary part of each even
subcarrier. Therefore, the input vector to the IFFT block
will be YPAM
0; 0; Y 0 ; 0; Y 1 ; 0; ; Y N22 ; 0; 0; 0; Y N22 ;
0; ; Y 0 ; 0. This is in contrast to the conventional PAM-
DMT scheme, where the imaginary part of all subcarriers
is modulated. The output time-domain signal yPAM;m ob-
tained after taking the IFFT of input symbols is asymmet-
rically clipped yPAM;m c , which will create noise/
interference IPAM on the real part of each even subcarrier.
After clipping, it is added to the first block. A CP is added
to the resulting combined clipped signal zm . After passing
through a D/A converter, this combined signal finally mod-
ulates the intensity of an optical transmitter such as an
LED or laser:
zm
xACO;m c  yPAM;m c

xACO;m  yPAM;m  iACO;m  iPAM;m ;
where iACO;m represents noise added to the bipolar
ACO-OFDM signal to get a clipped version and iPAM;m rep-
resents noise added to the bipolar PAM-DMT signal to gen-
erate a clipped signal. Notice that the clipping interference
created on both paths will interfere only with even subcar-
riers. Odd subcarriers will remain undisturbed. Therefore,
we should expect to have the same performance of the
ACO-OFDM block in this hybrid scheme as in the conven-
tional system if the same average transmit power is allo-
cated to ACO-OFDM subcarriers. On the other hand, due to
the addition of clipping interference to the imaginary part
of each even subcarrier, the performance of PAM-DMT will
deteriorate.
At the receiver, the transmitted signal is detected by a
photodetector, which converts it into an electrical signal
rt. Noise due to electrical components and ambient noise
from surroundings, which is modeled here as AWGN, gets
added to this signal [17]. This noise corrupted signal is
passed through an A/D converter, which will give us a dis-
crete time signal given by rm :
rm
zm  wm ; (8)
where wm represents the discrete time version of AWGN.
We assume a perfect timing and frequency-domain equali-
zation at the receiver. After removing the CP, the signal is
fed to the fast Fourier transform (FFT) block, which per-
(7) forms FFT operation to generate the frequency-domain

QAM
symbols
X [i ] Mapping IFFT Clip
S/P / Zero (N-point) P/S negative
Insertion
part
Conj() To optical
Add
Modulator
Cyclic D/A
Prefix Converter
PAM (CP)
symbols
Y [i ] Mapping IFFT Clip
S/P / Zero (N-point) P/S negative
Insertion
part
Constellation Conj()
Mapping
Transmitter

From
ACO- Detect Remove Photodetector
OFDM ACO- FFT Cyclic A/D
symbols S/P
OFDM (N-point) Prefix Converter
symbols (CP)

PAM-DMT
Subtract w (t )
noise AWGN
symbols

Receiver
FFT Asymmetric IFFT
(N-point) clipping (N-point)

Clipping noise generation

Fig. 2. Block diagram of baseband HACO-OFDM systems.

Bilal Ranjha and Mohsen Kavehrad VOL. 6, NO. 4/APRIL 2014/J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW. 391

 2
symbols Rk
Zk  W k , where k is the subcarrier index. 1 a 1
f xACO a
p exp ua  a; (11)
Zk
Zeven;k  Zodd;k  IACO;k  IPAM;k represents the sub- 2 a 2 2
2 a 2
carriers values at index k, and W k
W even;k  W odd;k gives
the frequency-domain representation of noise samples on and
even and odd subcarriers, respectively.
 2
It is observed that clipping operation causes the power of 1 b 1
f yPAM b
q exp 2
ub  b; (12)
the M-QAM symbols in odd subcarriers to be reduced by 2 b 2 2 b
2
half [14,16]. Therefore, to correctly estimate the received
symbols, odd subcarriers are simply multiplied by 2 to scale where 2a and 2b are the variances of the unclipped ACO-
them properly for recovery and detection. In this hybrid OFDM and PAM-DMT signals given by 2a
Efx2ACO mg
scheme, our first objective at the receiver is to correctly and 2b
Efy2PAM mg. From zm
xACO;m c  yPAM;m c
estimate ACO-OFDM symbols transmitted on odd subcar- and [20], the PDF of the combined signal can be obtained
riers. This will help us regenerate an estimate of clipping through convolution of two PDFs. Therefore, the PDF of the
noise I ACO;k falling on even subcarriers. Once we have esti- unipolar time-domain intensity modulating signal is
mated clipping noise in the frequency domain, we will sub-
Z
tract it from the received frequency-domain symbols on
f zHACO z
f xACO a f yPAM b
f x lf y z ldl
even subcarriers, and finally we will extract the imaginary
part to get an estimate of PAM symbols: Z  2 
1 l 1

p exp ul  l
2 2a 2 2a 2
Zeven;k
Zeven;k  IACO;k  IPAM;k  W even;k  I ACO;k : (9)    
1 z l2 1
q exp uz l  z l dl
2 2b 2 2b 2
The estimate of the PAM symbol is obtained by the fol-
lowing operation: Z   2  
1 l z l2

exp exp dl
2 a b 0 2 2a 2 2b
Y PAM
imagY even;k  Z    
0.5 l2

imagY even;k  IACO;k  W even;k IACO;k : (10)  p exp z l dl
2 2a 0 2 2a
Z    
Finally these estimated symbols will be used to detect 0.5 z l2
 q exp l dl
the transmitted bits using a PAM constellation demapper.
2 2b 0 2 2b
Remember that the interference generated by clipping
Z
PAM-DMT signal will only fall on the real part of even sub-
 0.25 lz ldl: (13)
carriers. Therefore, the final estimated PAM symbols will 0
be free from self-interference.
In the HACO-OFDM scheme, we do not need any DC After some manipulation and using the identity [21]
bias at the transmitter as shown in Fig. 2. Zero DC bias
Z  2 
also eliminates the DC canceler block from the receiver. u x p
However, on the receiver side, we need additional process- exp x
2 exp 2 
0 4
ing for clipping noise generation and cancellation. This in-      
p p p u
creases receiver complexity compared to the conventional Q 2 Q 2  p ;
2
ACO-OFDM scheme. Additional signal processing blocks
required include one IFFT and FFT block, one asymmetric (14)
clipper, and one block to compute the difference between
estimated and received symbols. Eq. (13) can be simplified as
 2   
expz2 2 2b  p z z p
f zHACO z
exp 4 Q 2 2
III. PDF OF HACO-OFDM a b b b
 
z p 
 z
Q 2 2  p
The PDF of the combined signal can be derived using the b 2
relationship given in Eq. (7). The output time-domain sig-   2  2 
0.5 1 z 1 z
nal from each IFFT block is obtained by the addition of a  p exp  exp uz
2 a 2 2a b 2 2b
large number of subcarriers modulated by uniformly dis-
tributed random symbols drawn from M-QAM or M-PAM  0.25z; (15)
constellations. Therefore as given in [18], the central limit
theorem can be applied, and the real output signal samples where we have used
 2a 2b 2 2a  2b  and
of ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT follow a Gaussian distribu-
z 2b .
tion with zero mean. However, after clipping, the PDF of Figures 3 and 4 show the simulated and theoretical
clipped output signal samples will become a clipped Gaus- PDF and cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the
sian distribution [19] given by HACO-OFDM signal, respectively. The graph shows that
392 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 6, NO. 4/APRIL 2014 Bilal Ranjha and Mohsen Kavehrad

0.7
simulation systems, the PAPR is computed per block. The PAPR of the
theory discrete time output HACO-OFDM signal in decibels is
0.6
defined as
0.5  
max0mN1 zm c 2
PAPRHACO dB
10 log10 : (16)
0.4 Efzm c 2 g
(z) Z(t)

The PAPR performance of a system is usually presented in

f

0.3
terms of the complimentary cumulative distribution func-
0.2 tion (CCDF). The CCDF of the PAPR is the probability that
the PAPR exceeds a certain value z:
0.1
CCDF
1 PPAPRHACO dB z: (17)
0
0 2 4 6 8 10 For a given system, a plot of CCDF of the PAPR on the y
Z axis and threshold on the x axis will be obtained. The graph
corresponding to a system that shows a low CCDF value for
Fig. 3. Comparison of theoretical and simulated PDF of HACO- a given threshold shows better performance.
OFDM.

simulated and theoretical values are almost overlapping
each other. Figure 3 also shows that the system is transmit-
ting low optical power most of the time, which makes this
technique a very power efficient scheme.
IV. PAPR OF HACO-OFDM
OFDM is a multicarrier signal with inherently high
PAPR due to the addition of a large number of subcarriers.
A high PAPR signal requires a large dynamic range A/D
converter and D/A converter and linear power amplifiers
(PAs) at the front end. Linear PAs are difficult to build
and are very expensive. In order to reduce the cost of
the overall system, it is desirable to use low-cost nonlinear
PAs with wider linear regions. Therefore, the PAPR of the
output signal plays a vital role in determining the cost of
the overall system and is considered as an important sys-
tem performance metric. The PAPR is the ratio of peak sig-
nal power to average signal power [18]. For OFDM-based
1.2
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section, we present simulation results that show
the performance of the proposed HACO-OFDM scheme
and a comparison with conventional ACO-OFDM and
PAM-DMT schemes. In order to compute the performance
of the proposed system in the AWGN channel, we per-
formed extensive computer simulations and found the
BER of individual blocks and the overall system. CCDF
curves to evaluate the PAPR performance of the combined
signal were also computed, and a comparison was devel-
oped. In computing the PAPR of the output combined sig-
nal, we used an oversampling rate of 4 to get accurate
results. We used an IFFT size of N
512 with M
N4.
For ACO-OFDM, we generated 128 symbols from M-QAM
constellations such as 4-, 16-, 64-, and 256-QAM, which
formed the input to the first IFFT block. Another 127 real
symbols were generated from M-PAM constellations that
formed the input to the IFFT block in the second branch
of hybrid systems. The difference between transmitted
and received bits was calculated and BER curves were
obtained for a given Ebelec N o .

A. Comparison With Conventional ACO-OFDM and

1
PAM-DMT

0.8
To compare the performance of ACO-OFDM and PAM-
Prob[Z < z]

simulation
theory
DMT blocks in hybrid schemes with their conventional
0.6 counterparts, we compute the BER in terms of the electri-
cal bit energy to noise power ratio Ebelec N o .
0.4 Figure 5 shows the BER performance of the ACO-OFDM
branch for various types of M-QAM constellation such as 4-,
0.2 16-, 64-, and 256-QAM. In this case, an equal proportion of
power was allocated to both PAM-DMT and ACO-OFDM.
From the figure, we notice that the performance of the
0
0 2 4 6 8 10 ACO-OFDM block is degraded by almost 3 dB compared
Z to the conventional systems. This is due to the fact that,
in our proposed hybrid system, only half of the power is al-
Fig. 4. Comparison of theoretical and simulated CDF of located to ACO-OFDM symbols that modulate odd subcar-
HACO-OFDM. riers compared to the conventional scheme. The remaining
Bilal Ranjha and Mohsen Kavehrad VOL. 6, NO. 4/APRIL 2014/J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW. 393

0
10 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-PAM. From the figure, we observe that
ACO 4QAM
ACO 16QAM BER performance degrades by a few decibels at lower
ACO 64QAM
ACO 256QAM
Ebelec N o , but it becomes identical to the conventional
10
1
HACO 4QAM PAM-DMT scheme at higher Ebelec N o. The performance
HACO 16QAM
HACO 64QAM
deterioration at lower Ebelec N o is due to the estimation
HACO 256QAM noise incurred during ACO-OFDM symbol detection.
However, at higher Ebelec N o, the estimation noise is sig-
BER

2
10
10
3
4 carriers except the DC and N2nd is modulated, but in our
10
0 5 10 15 20 25
Eb(elec)/No (dB)
Fig. 5. BER performance of ACO-OFDM and HACO-OFDM for
4-, 16-, 64-, and 256-QAM systems.
half of power is used by PAM-DMT symbols. Therefore, we
expect a 3 dB BER performance loss due to reduction in the
available average transmitted power. However, we also no-
tice that no performance degradation is caused by any kind
of clipping noise due to clipping of the signal in either the
first data branch or the second. This proves that
ACO-OFDM symbols modulating odd subcarriers remain
undisturbed by any kind of clipping noise. Therefore, in
reality, the performance of the ACO-OFDM branch in
the hybrid system is identical to the conventional scheme,
but due to half of the average transmitted power allocated
to ACO-OFDM, we see 3 dB degradation. Hence, we can
easily transmit symbols from a 2D constellation on odd
subcarriers without suffering from any kind of clipping
noise interference.
Figure 6 shows the BER performance of the PAM-DMT
block, which uses even subcarriers for data transmission.
Performance curves were obtained with the AWGN chan-
nel and for various types of M-PAM constellations such as
0 10
10
nificantly reduced and thus we get an identical perfor-
mance. We also observe that transmit power is halved
for PAM-DMT symbols in this scheme, but we do not see
a 3 dB performance penalty. This is due to the difference
in the number of subcarriers modulated by PAM symbols.
In conventional PAM-DMT, the imaginary part of all sub-
30 35 case, only the imaginary part of even subcarriers is modu-
lated. This reduces the data rate by two times. Therefore,
we have twice the power to transmit all even subcarriers as
compared to the conventional scheme. On the other hand,
the overall system power is divided equally in the HACO
system between ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT, which will re-
duce the transmit power for even subcarriers back to the
original value. Thus, we do not see any BER performance
deterioration for PAM-DMT due to reduced total average
transmit power.
However, if we only modulate half of the available sub-
carriers in the conventional PAM-DMT system and com-
pare its BER performance with the PAM-DMT block in
the HACO-OFDM system, we will definitely see a 3 dB per-
formance degradation using the same data rate. This can
be seen in Fig. 7, where we have plotted the BER of the
conventional PAM-DMT system with only half the subcar-
riers modulated and the BER of the PAM-DMT block in the
HACO-OFDM system. We clearly see a 3 dB difference in
performance.
Figure 8 shows CCDF curves for the PAPR of ACO-
OFDM, PAM-DMT, and the HACO-OFDM scheme. From
the figure, it is clear that addition of signals from two indi-
vidual schemes does not cause a PAPR penalty. In fact, the
CCDF curves show that the PAPR performance of the
0

1
1 10
10
BER

2
BER

2 10
10

4PAMDMT
8PAMDMT 4PAMDMT HACO
8PAMDMT HACO
16PAMDMT 3
3 10 16PAMDMT HACO
10 32PAMDMT
32PAMDMT HACO
4PAMDMT HACO 4PAMDMT M=(N/4)
8PAMDMT HACO 8PAMDMT M=(N/4)
16PAMDMT HACO 16PAMDMT M=(N/4)
32PAMDMT HACO 4
32PAMDMT M=(N/4)
4
10 10
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
Eb(elec)/No (dB) Eb(elec)/No (dB)

Fig. 6. BER performance of conventional PAM-DMT and HACO- Fig. 7. BER performance of conventional PAM-DMT with half
PAM-DMT for 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-PAM systems. subcarriers and PAM-DMT block in HACO-OFDM.
394 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 6, NO. 4/APRIL 2014 Bilal Ranjha and Mohsen Kavehrad
0
10 40
ACO 4QAM, PAMDMT 4PAM
ACO 16QAM, PAMDMT 4PAM
35 ACO 64QAM, PAMDMT 4PAM
ACO 256QAM, PAMDMT 4PAM
1
10
30
Pr[PAPR > PAPR ]
o

<E /N >BER (dB)

25
2
10

o
20

b
3 ACOOFDM 4QAM
10 4PAMDMT
15
4HACO
ACOOFDM 16QAM
16PAMDMT 10
4 16HACO
10
6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 5
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9
PAPRo (dB)
Proportion of Optical power on ACOOFDM subcarriers

Fig. 8. CCDF curves of PAPR for ACO-OFDM, PAM-DMT, Fig. 10. Comparison of hEbopt N o iBER for HACO-OFDM for vari-
and HACO-OFDM schemes for (4-QAM, 4-PAM) and (16-QAM, ous proportions of optical power and for different M-QAM constel-
16-PAM). lations used by ACO-OFDM.

hybrid scheme is slightly better than that of either of the
two subsystems. This reduction in PAPR can be attributed
to the fact that the total average power of the HACO sys-
tem slightly increases due to the addition of ACO-OFDM
and PAM-DMT signals. This can be seen in Fig. 9, where
we see the probability of the HACO signal having value
equal to zero is 0.25 compared to 0.5 of its constituent sub-
systems. Also, we observe there is a slight increase in the
probability of the HACO signal for lower values, which
indicates an increase in the average optical power of the
transmitted signal. This increase in the average power
results in some PAPR improvement seen in Fig. 8.
Therefore, these results show that our hybrid scheme
can increase the data rate of the conventional ACO-OFDM
system by two times without any loss of PAPR perfor-
mance. The only penalty to be paid is additional processing
required at the receiver.
B. Comparison With ADO-OFDM
In order to make a fair comparison between the perfor-
mance of our hybrid scheme and that of ADO-OFDM [15],
we will compute the BER performance in terms of normal-
ized optical bit energy to noise power Ebopt N o, where the
total average optical power is set to unity, i.e., Efzm g
1.
The BER performance of the HACO system will vary
depending upon the proportion of total optical power allo-
cated to ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT blocks. Therefore, we
will first determine the optimum power allocation based on
the lowest required hEbopt N o iBER , which is defined as
the value of normalized Ebopt N o required to achieve
BER
103 .
Both ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT branches in HACO
systems can use variable data rates; therefore, we will
30
ADOOFDM
HACOOFDM

25
HACO simulation
ACOOFDM simulation
(dB)

0.6
20
o BER

0.5
<E /N >

15
b

0.4
fZ(t)(z)

0.3
10

0.2

5
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
0.1
Bit rate/Normalized bandwidth

1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Fig. 11. Comparison of hEbopt N o iBER versus bit rate/normalized

Z bandwidth for HACO-OFDM and ADO-OFDM for various
proportions of optical power and for different constellations. The
Fig. 9. PDF comparison of HACO-OFDM and ACO-OFDM minimum value of hEbopt N o iBER is shown for each constellation
systems. combination.
Bilal Ranjha and Mohsen Kavehrad VOL. 6, NO. 4/APRIL 2014/J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW. 395

TABLE I
LIST OF PARAMETERS TO GENERATE FIG. 10
Rb BWNorm Parameters
2 ACO 4-QAM, DCO 4-QAM bias
5.5, ACO power
0.2 (ADO-OFDM);
ACO 4-QAM, PAM 4-PAM, ACO power
0.4 (HACO-OFDM)
3 ACO 16-QAM, DCO 4-QAM bias
5.1, ACO power
0.4 (ADO-OFDM);
ACO 16-QAM, PAM 4-PAM, ACO power
0.6 (HACO-OFDM)
4 ACO 64-QAM, DCO 4-QAM bias
4.3, ACO power
0.6 (ADO-OFDM);
ACO 64-QAM, PAM 4-PAM, ACO power
0.8 (HACO-OFDM)
5 ACO 256-QAM, DCO 4-QAM bias
3.9, ACO power
0.7 (ADO-OFDM);
ACO 64-QAM, PAM 16-PAM, ACO power
0.4 (HACO-OFDM)
6 ACO 256-QAM, DCO 16-QAM bias
6.46, ACO power
0.5 (ADO-OFDM);
ACO 256-QAM, PAM 16-PAM, ACO power
0.6 (HACO-OFDM)

develop a performance comparison in terms of average
bit rate to normalized bandwidth. The average bit rate
for HACO-OFDM systems is given by log2 M ACO 
log2 M PAM 2, where M ACO and M PAM are the constellation
sizes of the M-QAM and M-PAM mapping schemes. We will
generate a graph that shows variations of hEbopt N o iBER
with average bit rate/normalized bandwidth. Following
[15], we define system bandwidth as the position of the first
spectral null. In our analysis, we will also use normalized
bandwidth, which is defined as system bandwidth normal-
ized relative to the bandwidth of onoff keying (OOK) of the
same data rate. Both ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT systems
are OFDM-based systems that have their first spectral
nulls at normalized frequency of 1  2N, where N is
the size of the IFFT/FFT used. For the ACO-OFDM system
using 16-QAM and PAM-DMT using 16-PAM, the average
bit rate per normalized bandwidth is given by log2 M ACO 
log2 M PAM 21  2N.
Figure 10 shows the variation of hEbopt N o iBER when
the optical power allocated to the ACO-OFDM block is var-
ied from 0.1 to 0.9. In this case we have chosen a fixed
4-PAM constellation mapping for PAM-DMT while using
4-, 16-, 64-, and 256-QAM constellations for ACO-OFDM.
The graph shows that when ACO-OFDM uses 4-QAM with
the 4-PAM constellation used by PAM-DMT, minimum val-
ues of hEbopt N o iBER can be achieved when the proportion
of optical power allocated to ACO-OFDM is 0.4.
Figure 11 shows hEbopt N o iBER versus the average bit
rate/normalized bandwidth for ADO-OFDM and HACO-
OFDM systems. The plots are obtained for the lowest val-
ues of hEbopt N o iBER for a given set of mapping schemes
and distribution of optical power on both subsystems of
HACO-OFDM and ADO-OFDM. In each case, the average
optical power was set to unity with varying proportion of
optical power on ACO-OFDM and PAM-DMT. From the
plots we see that for an average bit rate/normalized band-
width of 2, 3, 4, and 6, HACO-OFDM performs much better
than ADO-OFDM. However, for an average bit rate/nor-
malized bandwidth of 5, the performance difference is
not significant. The maximum performance difference oc-
curs for an average bit rate/normalized bandwidth of 2,
where HACO-OFDM requires 5 dB less optical power to
achieve than ADO-OFDM. The parameters used for
obtaining hEbopt N o iBER for an average bit rate/normal-
ized bandwidth ranging from 2 to 6 for ADO-OFDM and
HACO-OFDM are given in Table I, where we have denoted
the average bit rate/normalized bandwidth by Rb BWNorm.
From Figs. 10 and 11, we see that HACO-OFDM per-
forms much better than ADO-OFDM for a range of average
bit rate/normalized bandwidth values. HACO-OFDM also
does not require any DC bias at the transmitter as required
by ADO-OFDM. This makes the HACO-OFDM transmitter
simpler than ADO-OFDM and more power efficient.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have presented a hybrid ACO-OFDM
scheme that uses a combination of both ACO-OFDM and
PAM-DMT techniques. Our system increases the data rate
of the conventional ACO-OFDM system by two times
without any penalty in the BER performance of the conven-
tional scheme. The 3 dB penalty observed for the ACO-
OFDM block was only due to half of the available transmit
power compared with the conventional system. No other
factor deteriorates ACO-OFDM performance. Our system
does not require any DC bias at the transmitter, which
makes it power efficient and relatively simple. Zero DC
bias at the transmitter also eliminates the use of a DC can-
celer at the receiver. On the other hand, noise cancellation
at the receiver does require extra processing, which makes
the receiver more complex. Our computer simulations also
show that the PAPR of the hybrid signal is slightly less
than individual constituent systems of the hybrid scheme.
This makes our scheme ever more power efficient com-
pared to other techniques. No additional bandwidth is re-
quired as the unused subcarriers are used for PAM-DMT
modulation, which were previously left unused. Therefore,
our proposed system provides a very power efficient hybrid
OFDM modulation technique that does not require any DC
bias, and it can be used in IM/DD OW systems.
REFERENCES
[1] L. Cimini, Analysis and simulation of a digital mobile chan-
nel using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, IEEE
Trans. Commun., vol. 33, no. 7, pp. 665675, 1985.
[2] J. A. C. Bingham, Multicarrier modulation for data transmis-
sion: An idea whose time has come, IEEE Commun.
Mag., vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 514, 1990.
396 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 6, NO. 4/APRIL 2014
[3] M. Afgani, H. Haas, H. Elgala, and D. Knipp, Visible light
communication using OFDM, in 2nd Int. Conf. Testbeds
and Research Infrastructures for the Development of
Networks and Communities (TRIDENTCOM), 2006,
pp. 129134.
[4] H. Elgala, R. Mesleh, and H. Haas, Practical considerations
for indoor wireless optical system implementation using
OFDM, in 10th Int. Conf. Telecommunications (ConTEL),
2009, pp. 2529.
[5] J. Armstrong, OFDM for optical communications, J. Light-
wave Technol., vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 189204, 2009.
[6] M. Kavehrad, Broadband room service by light, Sci. Am.,
vol. 297, no. 1, pp. 8287, July 2007.
[7] J. Kahn, J. Barry, M. Audeh, J. Carruthers, W. Krause, and G.
Marsh, Non-directed infrared links for high-capacity wire-
less lans, IEEE Pers. Commun., vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 1225, 1994.
[8] J. Carruthers and J. Kahn, Multiple-subcarrier modulation
for non-directed wireless infrared communication, in IEEE
Global Telecommunications Conf. (GLOBECOM), 1994, vol. 2,
pp. 10551059.
[9] H. Elgala, R. Mesleh, and H. Haas, A study of LED nonlinear-
ity effects on optical wireless transmission using OFDM,
in IFIP Int. Conf. Wireless and Optical Communications
Networks (WOCN), 2009, pp. 15.
[10] O. Gonzalez, R. Perez-Jimenez, S. Rodriguez, J. Rabadan, and
A. Ayala, Adaptive OFDM system for communications over
the indoor wireless optical channel, IEE Proc. Optoelectron.,
vol. 153, no. 4, pp. 139144, 2006.
[11] S. C. J. Lee, S. Randel, F. Breyer, and A. M. J. Koonen,
PAM-DMT for intensity-modulated and direct-detection
optical communication systems, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett.,
vol. 21, no. 23, pp. 17491751, 2009.
[12] J. Armstrong and B. Schmidt, Comparison of asymmetrically
clipped optical OFDM and DC-biased optical OFDM in
AWGN, IEEE Commun. Lett., vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 343345,
2008.
[13] J. Armstrong, B. Schmidt, D. Kalra, H. Suraweera, and A.
Lowery, Performance of asymmetrically clipped optical
OFDM in AWGN for an intensity modulated direct detection
system, in IEEE Global Telecommunications Conf.
(GLOBECOM), 2006, pp. 15.
[14] L. Chen, B. Krongold, and J. Evans, Diversity combining for
asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM in IM/DD channels, in
IEEE Global Telecommunications Conf. (GLOBECOM), 2009,
pp. 16.
[15] S. D. Dissanayake and J. Armstrong, Comparison of ACO-
OFDM, DCO-OFDM and ADO-OFDM in IM/DD systems,
J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 31, no. 7, pp. 10631072, 2013.
[16] J. Armstrong and A. Lowery, Power efficient optical OFDM,
Electron. Lett., vol. 42, no. 6, pp. 370372, 2006.
Bilal Ranjha and Mohsen Kavehrad
[17] J. Kahn and J. Barry, Wireless infrared communications,
Proc. IEEE, vol. 85, no. 2, pp. 265298, 1997.
[18] H. Seung and J. Lee, An overview of peak-to-average
power ratio reduction techniques for multicarrier transmis-
sion, IEEE Wirel. Commun., vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 5665,
2005.
[19] X. Li, R. Mardling, and J. Armstrong, Channel capacity
of IM/DD optical communication systems and of ACO-
OFDM, in IEEE Int. Conf. Communications (ICC), 2007,
pp. 21282133.
[20] A. Papoulis and S. U. Pillai, Probability, Random Variables,
and Stochastic Processes. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
[21] I. S. Gradshteyn and I. M. Ryzhik, Table of Integrals, Series,
and Products, 7th ed. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Academic, 2007.
Bilal Ranjha is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical
Engineering Department at Pennsylvania State University. He
received his M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Columbia
University, New York, in 2010. His research interests include
digital communication systems, OFDM based wireless communi-
cation systems, SCFDMA, signal processing for wireless commu-
nication, MIMO OFDM, and optical wireless.
Mohsen Kavehrad received his Ph.D. degree from Polytechnic
University (Brooklyn Polytechnic), Brooklyn, New York, in
November 1977, in electrical engineering. Between 1978 and
1989, he worked on telecommunications problems for Fairchild In-
dustries, GTE (Satellite and Labs.), and AT&T Bell Laboratories.
In 1989, he joined the University of Ottawa EE Department, as a
full professor. Since January 1997, he has been with the Pennsyl-
vania State University EE Department as the W. L. Weiss Chair
Professor and the founding Director of the Center for Information
and Communications Technology Research. He is a Fellow of the
IEEE for his contributions to wireless communications and optical
networking. He received three Bell Labs awards for his contribu-
tions to wireless communications, the 1990 TRIO feedback award
for a patent on an optical interconnect, the 2001 IEEE VTS Neal
Shepherd best paper award, three IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics
Society best paper awards between 1991 and 1995, and a Canada
NSERC Ph.D.-thesis award in 1995, with his graduate students,
for contributions to wireless systems and optical networks. He
has more than 300 published papers, several book chapters, books,
and patents in these areas. His current research interests are in
wireless communications and optical networks. He is a former
Technical Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications,
IEEE Communications Magazine, and the IEEE Magazine of
Lightwave Telecommunications Systems. Presently, he is on the
Editorial Board of the International Journal of Wireless Informa-
tion Networks. He served as the General Chair of leading IEEE
conferences and workshops. He has chaired and organized and
been on the advisory committee for several international conferen-
ces and workshops.