A comparative performance study of optical subsystem equalization in OFDM-based and OWDM-based Radio-over-Fiber systems

In this paper the impact of a Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) optical subsystem on the performance of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) using Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is evaluated. The study investigates the use of pilot-aided channel estimation to equalize the optical subsystem nonlinearities in the presence of AWGN. The results show that there are some DWT-based OFDM schemes whose system Bit Error Rate (BER) outperform that of the DFT-based OFDM for different modulation schemes. Specially, Haar wavelet achieves the best BER performance. Also, DWT-OFDM achieves more efficiently than DFT-OFDM in nonlinear systems.