Theoretical and experimental analysis of clipping-induced impulsive noise in AM-VSB subcarrier multiplexed lightwave systems

A new theoretical and experimental analysis of clipping-induced impulsive noise in directly modulated AM-VSB/digital hybrid lightwave systems is presented. The theoretical model is based on asymptotic clipping and shot noise theories, and the probability density of combined Gaussian and impulsive noise is obtained by performing a numerical inverse Fourier transform on the closed-form characteristic function. Similar analyzes in previously published work have resulted in closed-form expressions for the BER in hybrid AM-VSB/QAM systems, but these models, which do not use the numerical inverse Fourier transform, have either required the use of an experimentally measured clipping rate using a spectrum analyzer or have had limited BER prediction accuracy. Application of our theory to experimental results for the BER in a hybrid AM-VSB/64 QAM system demonstrates that the performance of the model if better than the models of previously published works. Theoretical analysis of a similar hybrid system employing the N-VSB HDTV digital modulation format rather than QAM indicates that an improvement in BER is achieved if 8-VSB at double the symbol rate is used instead of 64 QAM. We also present the first experimental characterization of the amplitude and time distribution of (1) low-frequency bandpass and (2) down-converted impulsive noise and we show that the time interval between clipping events has a high probability of being 167 μs, 1.5 μs, or 4 ms in an NTSC system with unmodulated carriers. These results have potential impact on forward error correcting codes used to ameliorate the degrading effects of clipping