Flip-OFDM for Optical Wireless Communications

TL;DR

This paper compares two unipolar OFDM techniques for optical wireless communications, analyzing their performance and hardware complexity, and finds that Flip-OFDM offers similar performance to ACO-OFDM with reduced hardware requirements.

Contribution

The paper provides the first performance analysis of Flip-OFDM and proposes modifications to compare it with ACO-OFDM in optical wireless channels.

Findings

Flip-OFDM and ACO-OFDM have similar performance.

Flip-OFDM reduces hardware complexity by 50% in slow fading channels.

Both techniques effectively compensate multipath distortion.

Abstract

We consider two uniploar OFDM techniques for optical wireless communications: asymmetric clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) and Flip-OFDM. Both techniques can be used to compensate multipath distortion effects in optical wireless channels. However, ACO-OFDM has been widely studied in the literature, while the performance of Flip-OFDM has never been investigated. In this paper, we conduct the performance analysis of Flip-OFDM and propose additional modification to the original scheme in order to compare the performance of both techniques. Finally, it is shown by simulation that both techniques have the same performance but different hardware complexities. In particular, for slow fading channels, Flip-OFDM offers 50% saving in hardware complexity over ACO-OFDM at the receiver.