Abstract
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a popular modulation format by splitting a high-speed data stream into a number of substreams of lower data rate and then transmits these data substreams on adjacent orthogonal subcarriers [1]. Due to its multi-carrier nature, one of the biggest drawbacks of OFDM is the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which introduces several disadvantages, such as increasing complexity of the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters (ADC/DAC) and reducing power efficiency of the optical modulator [2]. The simplest way to reduce PAPR is peak power clipping. In this thesis, we proposed a Forward Error Correction (FEC) enhanced data clipped 10-Gbps optical OFDM system to reduce PAPR effect. After 8000km of single mode fiber (SMF) transmission, numerical simulations indicate >5-dB optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) improvements under high clipping ratio of 6-dB with FEC. In addition, our system also exhibits a 1.5-dB OSNR improvement over the case with only FEC applied but without peak power clipping.