IEEE Photonics Journal Performance Optimization by NPHE
been widely demonstrated in optical and fiber-wireless communication systems [1]–[6]. Owing to its
inherent merits such as high sidelobe suppression ratio, large asynchronous transmission feature,
high spectrum efficiency due to the non-requirement of cyclic prefix (CP) and time-frequency
domain well-localized pulse shapes, increasing system robustness against inter-carrier interference
(ICI) and frequency offset due to lower out-of-band power leakage [6] etc., it has been considered
as one of the most promising candidate waveform for intensity modulated direct detection-based
(IMDD) optical network transmission system [7]. For the OQAM-OFDM, it is essential to employ a
digital-to-analog convertor (DAC) to convert the OQAM-OFDM samples to time-domain waveforms.
Apparently, a high bit resolution is desirable for DACs implement, but such a resolution would lead
to high power consumption and cost [8], [9]. Besides, based on our previous work [10], it has
been verified that, the bit precisions of inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) and FFT were also the
important limiting factors, and the quantization noise caused by these operations would worsen
the system performance.
To deal with these issues, the common amplitude limiting [10], and the encoded peak-to-average
power ratio (PAPR) reduction [11], [12] schemes were proposed in IMDD-OFDM system to reduce
the bit resolution. However, for these schemes, only few quantization bits were reduced or the
limited performance improvements were achieved, and either extra complexity or clipping noises
were introduced which would be not suitable for the practical system. In fact, it is easy to get that,
the system performance strongly depends on the statistical distribution of the low-bit resolution
multicarrier signals’ samples, namely the quantization bit of small signal [13]. To deal with this, the
nonuniform quantization scheme with the Gaussian-like distribution assumption was proposed in
OFDM-based and OQAM-OFDM system [14], [15]. Besides, different from the common OFDM,
owing to the filtering effect of OQAM-OFDM signal a non-perfect Gaussian distri bution of signal
would be achieved, in which a sharp peak would occur on top of gaussian spectr um. In this way,
the nonuniform quantization with the Gaussian-like assumption would not be the optimal selection
for the IMDD-based OQAM-OFDM system.
Therefore, we propose the nonuniform quantization scheme with a novel nonparametric his-
togram signal sample estimation to quantify the signals for further reducing the DAC bits with
the acceptable system performance in the IMDD-based system. Due to no any requirements of
signal distribution in advance, this scheme would be more suitable for the irregular distribution
OQAM-OFDM system. In addition, by selecting the appropriate kernel density function and win-
dow width, the OQAM-OFDM signals’ distribution can be accurately estimated. Then, by combin-
ing nonlinear programming technique, the optimal nonuniform-distr ibuted discrete output levels of
OQAM-OFDM signal are achieved. In this way, more effective quantization bits can be assigned to
the small OQAM-OFDM signals hence reducing quantization noise and improving system perfor-
mance. To verify the feasibility of this scheme, the simulation (the commercial software OptiSystem
13) and experiment with the 10-Gb/s 16-OQAM-OFDM signal for 20-km fiber transmission with
different DACs and IFFT/FFT bit resolution is constructed. The simulation results show t hat, for
the 4-bit and 6-bit DAC case, ∼9.1 dB and ∼3.4 dB receiver sensitivity improvement @BER =
3.8e-3 can be achieved in comparison with the common uniform scheme, and compared to the
Gaussian-like distribution nonuniform method, our scheme also demonstrates better performance.
Meanwhile, by experiment, we can easily get that, our scheme with the 5-bit DAC can achieve
the same performance as the common scheme with 7-bit DAC. Therefore, our demonstrated
scheme can be considered as a promising way to improve the performance of the IMDD-based
OQAM-OFDM optical system, especially with the low-bit resolution DAC.
2. Principle
Firstly, we give the schematic diagram of IMDD OQAM-OFDM system to fur ther illustrate the
proposed NPHE scheme as shown in Fig. 1, which includes optical OQAM-OFDM transmitter,
fiber transmission link and OQAM-OFDM receiver. At the transmitter, as configured in our previous
work [15], the pseudo-random binary sequence (PRBS) data is firstly mapped into M-order offset
quadrature amplitude modulation (M-OQAM) complex symbols, then is divided into the odd and
Vol. 10, No. 4, August 2018 7905013