Mean square error analysis of improved receivers for unipolar communications - Asymmetrically Clipped Optical OFDM

Recently, an improved receiving technique for Optical Wireless (OW) with Intensity Modulation and Direct Detection (IM-DD) communication systems, implementing Asymmetrically-Clipped Optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) modulation, has been proposed. It uses the previously discarded (so called in the literature) “clipping noise” to generate an improved estimator for the transmitted signal, up to 3dB in the receiver performance, without a change in the modulated signal, and with negligible complexity increase at the receiver. In this work we analyze the performance of the improved receiver, as a function of the input SNR; find the optimal parameters of the proposed receiver; show a range of parameters that guarantee performance improvement over the regular receiver; and find a set of fixed parameters that give near optimal performance for all input SNR, thus establishing a simple receiver without the need to estimate the input SNR.