Proceedings of 2013 IEEE Conference on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT 2013)

Mitigation of Nonlinear Effects Using Uniform

Power Transmission in Coherent OOFDM Systems
G.Gaswin Kastro M.Palanivelan Sheila Anand
M.E Communication Systems Associate Professor, Dep. of ECE Dean (Research) Computer Studies,
Rajalakshmi Engineering College Rajalakshmi Engineering College Rajalakshmi Engineering College,
Chennai, India Chennai, India Chennai, India,
kastrog7@gmail.com palanivelan.m@rajalakshmi.edu.in sheila.anand@rajalakshmi.edu.in

Abstract—We investigate the high peak power resulting
from the transmission of orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing (OFDM) signals through optical fiber. High peak-
to-average power ratio (PAPR) which is a major drawback of
OFDM can make worse the nonlinearities experienced in
optical fibers. Phase modulation instead of intensity
modulation is adopted to keep the amplitude of optical power
within the fiber uniform. To effectively combat the high peak
power that results from the addition of number of subcarriers
of OFDM in time domain, we apply Reduced Complexity Max
Norm (RCMN) technique which is a distortion less PAPR
reduction scheme. The proposed technique offers 3.7dB
reduction in PAPR.
Keywords—Optical OFDM; Peak-to-average power ratio;
Phase modulation; RCMN.
I. INTRODUCTION
The orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)
is a modulation and multiplexing technique, which is widely
used in wireless communication systems. Orthogonal
frequency division multiplexing is a multicarrier modulation
technique where a wideband signal is divided into a set of
independent narrow band orthogonal signals, each at a
different frequency band. The advantage of multicarrier
modulation lies mainly in the fact that in the presence of
channel selective frequency fading only a small part of the
data is lost whereas in single carrier systems, the whole data
stream is affected. OFDM is robust against narrowband
interference because such interference affects only a small
percentage of the subcarriers. OFDM is being used in
different applications including Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, Digital
Video Broadcasting Television (DVB-TV), and in the new
next generation of mobile systems, Long-Term Evolution
(LTE).
Rapid advances in the field of high-speed digital signal
processing have recently enabled the use of orthogonal
frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for fiber-optic
applications. A number of researches have shown that
OFDM is also a promising technology for optical
communications. Optical OFDM (O-OFDM) [1-4] has
shown extreme robustness to fiber chromatic dispersion and
polarization mode dispersion (PMD). The Optical OFDM
has additional advantage of achieving high spectral
efficiency. For fiber optic transmission systems, OFDM
comes in two types, namely direct-detected optical OFDM
(DDO-OFDM) and coherent-optical OFDM (CO-OFDM).
DDO-OFDM is realized by sending the optical carrier along
with the OFDM band so that direct detection with a single
photodiode can be used at the receiver to convert the optical
field back into the electrical field. In a CO-OFDM system,
the optical carrier is phase modulated at the transmitter and
the receiver is realized by coherent detection with a local
oscillator synchronized with the optical LASER source.
Coherent optical OFDM (CO-OFDM) offers the ultimate
performance in spectral efficiency, polarization or chromatic
dispersion tolerance and receiver sensitivity. In both DDO-
OFDM and CO-OFDM external modulation of the LASER
source is employed commonly.
Though OFDM has many advantages, one major
drawback of OFDM is the high peak-to-average power ratio
(PAPR) in the time domain. Moreover, because the
nonlinear effects in the transmission links are proportional
to the instantaneous signal power, a large PAPR will cause
strong nonlinear impairments degrading the transmission
performance. For design simplicity and low-cost operation,
the optical intensity modulation (IM) of OFDM signals is
commonly employed for signal generation and detection in
optical transmission systems. However, after propagating
through cascaded spans of standard single-mode fibers
(SSMFs) and erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), the
high PAPR of OFDM waveforms can induce an
accumulated effect of large nonlinear distortions at some
peak signal power levels.
In section II we have discussed the existing methods to
reduce PAPR and to overcome the fiber non-linearities. In
section III the proposed system that is capable of reducing
the non-linearities by reducing PAPR and adopting phase
modulation will be discussed. The simulation of the design
using VPI and the obtained results will be discussed in
section IV and finally the conclusion is presented in section
V.
II. RELATED WORK
CO-OFDM has been proposed as a system that requires
no chromatic dispersion compensation [5]. The OFDM
signal is said to be resistant to chromatic dispersion
experienced in the fiber. Chromatic dispersion in optical
channel is equivalent to the frequency selective fading that

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occurs in wireless channels. Moreover CO-OFDM is said to
be an excellent candidate for long-haul transmission system
because it has superior performance in terms of optical
signal to noise ratio (OSNR) requirements, PMD tolerance
and spectral efficiency. PAPR which is a major drawback of
OFDM makes it highly sensitive to non-linearities in the
optical fiber. Several techniques had been introduced before
to reduce the PAPR in conventional OFDM systems. In [6]
some of the important techniques to reduce PAPR had been
discussed. Amplitude clipping and filtering, Selected
Mapping (SLM) and Partial Transmit Sequence (PTS) were
known to be the common methods for PAPR mitigation.
There are also various other PAPR reduction techniques
such as Tone Injection, Tone Reservation, Interleaving
Technique etc. In [7] some of these PAPR reduction
techniques had been applied to the optical OFDM systems.
In [8-9] clipping and predistortion are introduced to the
radio frequency OFDM transmitter to compensate the
nonlinearity effect introduced by the optical in-
phase/quadrature modulator. Though clipping the OFDM
signal is the simplest, low complex technique to reduce
PAPR, it results in signal distortion and therefore not
considered as an effective technique. High signal clipping
ratio will introduce some deleterious side effects, such as
increase in error bit rate and growth of in-band and out-of-
band radiation [10]. Electronic predistortion requires a
feedback path from receiver to transmitter to optimize the
transmitted waveform; so it cannot cope with rapid channel
variations and the signal cannot be recovered at points
between the transmitter and receiver [11]. SLM and PTS are
distortionless techniques and works better than distortion
based techniques.
Though when the PAPR is supressed, amplitude
fluctuations caused by Intensity modulation may make the
transmitted optical sigal sensitive to the fiber non-linearities
[12-15]. Phase modulation Instead of Intensity modulation is
an effective way to modulate the optical signal. Using this
technique, the signal changes the phase of the modulated
lightwave and maintains the uniform optical power. Thus by
reducing the PAPR by adopting a distortionless technique
and maintaining uniform optical power within the fiber by
adopting phase modulation, the effects of non-linearity is
highly mitigated in CO-OFDM systems.
III. PROPOSED SYSTEM
In fiber optic communication systems, linear impairments
are due to fiber loss, Chromatic dispersion (CD) and
Polarization mode dispersion (PMD). Optical power loss
due to light propagation inside the fiber results from
absorption and scattering and it can be easily compensated
by optical amplifiers. CD and PMD are the main linear
impairments for optical communication systems. Major
degrading effects due to fiber non-linearity are Self-phase
modulation (SPM), Cross phase modulation (XPM), Four
wave mixing (FWM), Stimulated Brillioun Scattering (SBS)
and Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS). For intense
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electromagnetic fields, any dielectric medium behaves like a
non-linear medium. Fundamentally the origin of non-
linearity lies in an-harmonic motion of bound electrons
under the influence of an applied field. Nonlinear effects in
optical fibers occur due to (1) changes in the refractive
index of the medium with optical intensity and, (2) inelastic
scattering phenomenon in fiber. The power dependence of
the refractive index of fiber is responsible for the Kerr-
effect. Depending upon the type of input signal, the Kerr-
nonlinearity manifests itself in three different effects such as
SPM, XPM and FWM. At high power level, the inelastic
scattering phenomenon can induce stimulated effects such
as SBS and SRS. The intensity of scattered light grows
exponentially if the incident power exceeds a certain
threshold value. The difference between Brillouin and
Raman scattering is that the Brillouin generated phonons
(acoustic) are coherent and give rise to a macroscopic
acoustic wave in the fiber, while in Raman scattering the
phonons (optical) are incoherent and no macroscopic wave
is generated. Except for SPM and CPM, all nonlinear effects
provide gains to some channel at the expense of depleting
power from other channels. SPM and CPM affect only the
phase of signals and can cause broadening of the spectrum,
which leads to increased dispersion. The effective refractive
index ( neff ) of a nonlinear medium can be expressed in
terms of the input power ( P ) and effective core area of
fiber ( Aeff ) as,
P
neff = nl + nnl (1)
Aeff
Where nl and nnl represents the refractive index when the
optical fiber is experiencing linear and nonlinear conditions
respectively. So the non-linearity in the fiber places a
constraint on the maximum optical power that can be
launched into the fiber. Though the optical power launched
into the fiber is chosen to be below the desired threshold, the
PAPR resulting from the OFDM signal may exacerbate the
non-linearities in the fiber [16-19]. Moreover the commonly
followed intensity modulation may result in optical power
fluctuation within the fiber and thus makes worse the fiber
non-linearities. The transmitter and receiver block diagrams
of the proposed system is shown in the Fig. 1 and Fig. 2
respectively.
Fig. 1. Proposed OFDM transmitter
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Fig. 2. Proposed OFDM receiver
The first few blocks of the transmitter block diagram
corresponds to the OFDM coder. In O-OFDM the OFDM
signal is electrically generated and then modulated using a
LASER source before transmission through the optical fiber.
The binary data is first mapped to QAM or QPSK symbols
and then arranged for IFFT operation. After IFFT the
subcarriers should be checked for high PAPR. We
incorporate RCMN which is a distortionless linear PAPR
reduction technique [20]. The operation of the RCMN
technique is illustrated in the Fig.3 and Fig.4.
Fig. 3. Flow diagram of the RCMN algorithm at the transmitter
After the PAPR is suppressed the symbols are converted
to analogue form using DAC. Now this signal is externally
modulated using a LASER source. The direct modulation of
a laser is cheap and also easy to adapt to low cost
applications for moderated distances or transmission rates.
However, for advanced applications involving high data rates
or long distance links, external modulation is a good
solution. Since we are proposing phase modulation to reduce
the nonlinearities in the fiber we phase modulate the optical
source, where the optical source is a continuous wave
LASER. After phase modulation the optical signal
containing the OFDM signal is launched into the fiber. The
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reception of optical signal is done using photodetector.
Before photodetection the received optical signal is
combined with a local oscillator LASER source which is
synchronized with the LASER source used at the transmitter
side. The detected optical signal is then demodulated using
OFDM decoder that performs the reverse operation of the
OFDM coder discussed above.
Fig. 4. flow diagram of the RCMN algorithm at the receiver
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
The simulation was carried out using Virtual Photonics
Integrated (VPI) which is a powerful tool that allows
simulating a wide range of optical transmission designs. VPI
is hierarchically organised. This allows an easier
management of the modules taking part in a simulation, as
they can be treated independently or as a group when
necessary. The VPI modules can be classified into three
levels such as the universe, galaxy and star. A star
represents a unique module with a specific function which
cannot be subdivided into other modules. A galaxy can be
described as a second level module formed by a set of
interconnected stars (or even other galaxies). In order to be
implemented on a universe, a galaxy must contain at least
one input or output port. The universe is the only module
that can be executed by the user. It represents the whole
simulation scenario, and it can consist of a combination of
interconnected stars and galaxies. The parameters of each
module can be set or adjusted using the Parameter Editor
Window (PEW). Before beginning the simulation the
parameters of VPI has to be carefully chosen, the failure of
this may cause errors. Since generation of subcarriers
includes IFFT algorithm at the transmitter side and its
detection includes FFT algorithm at the receiver side, VPI
works better when the sample rate and time window
parameters are set such that they are in powers of 2.
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Fig. 5. VPI simulation design
The various parameters associated with the simulation is
given in the Table I.
TABLE I
SIMULATION PARAMETERS
Fiber Length 1000 Km
Fiber Attenuation 0.2dB/Km
Bit Rate 10 Gbps
Modulation 4-QAM
Number of FFT carriers 64
Cyclic Prefix 20%
Fig.5 shows the universe schematic of the
simulation setup. It consists of four galaxies named as
ofdmcoder, ofdmdecoder, up_converter and downconverter
as shown in the figure. An important feature of VPI is
Cosimulation, which we have exploited in our simulation.
The PRBS module provides binary bits at the rate of 10GHz
as input to the ofdm_coder galaxy. The ofdm_coder galaxy
includes a cosimulation module that interfaces a matlab
program with VPI. This matlab program is coded to
generate OFDM signal and also implements the PAPR
reduction scheme within the code. After the IFFT operation
is performed the resulting complex values are checked for
high PAPR using the RCMN technique. The output of the
OFDM coder is then upconverted to 7.5GHz by the
upconverter galaxy. This upconverted OFDM signal is then
externally modulated using a LASER source. Since we have
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applied phase modulation for reducing the fiber
nonlinearities we externally modulate a continuous wave
LASER source using an ideal phase modulator. The LASER
source operates at 193.1THz. This modulated optical signal
is now launched into standard single mode fiber of 10 loops
with each loop contributing 100Kms of length. Each loop
can be assisted with an optical amplifier and an optical filter
to produce a better signal constellation. We have chosen
single mode fiber because the non-linear effects are low
compared to the multimode fiber.
At the receiver side the optical signal is detected
using a photodetector. A suitable type of photodetector can
be chosen using the PEW of VPI. Before the optical signal
is detected, the signal from the fiber is combined with a
local oscillator laser diode synchronized with the optical
source and this is for the purpose of coherent detection. The
detected signal is then downconverted using the
downconverter module and then fed to the OFDM decoder
galaxy which performs the reverse process of the OFDM
coder. The demodulated signal can be numerically plotted
by using the NumericalAnalyzer1D_vtms module and the
optical and electrical signals at various points can be viewed
and analysed using SignalAnalyzer_vmts module.
Fig.6 shows the received constellation obtained by
plotting the I and Q components of the received signal.
Since we have used 4-QAM symbol mapping we have got
four ideal points in the constellation. Fig.7 shows the optical
power spectrum after the LASER source is externally
modulated by the optical phase modulator. The frequency
values (in GHz) in the x axis are relative to 193.1 THz, so
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this is the real frequency for the 0 Hz value in the graph.
This will also be the frequency for the optical carrier signal,
which is separated by a 5 GHz gap from both the suppressed
lower sideband (left in the graph) and the optical OFDM
signal centred at 7.5 GHz from the optical carrier.
Fig. 6. Received constellation
Fig. 7. Modulated power spectrum
Fig. 8. OSNR plot
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The Optical Signal to Noise Ratio (OSNR) is plotted against
the fiber length and is shown in the Fig.8.
PAPR plot
1
Original
0.9 RCMN
0.8
CCDF (P r[P A P R> P A P R0])
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
PAPR0 [dB]
Fig. 9. CCDF plot of RCMN with original values
To compare and evaluate the PAPR optimization
performance, extensive simulations have been performed
based on RCMN algorithm using MATLAB. At CCDF of
0.5 the proposed scheme offers 7.5 dB and RCMN with 3.8
dB. Therefore PAPR reduction of 3.7 dB is obtained.
V. CONCLUSION
Coherent Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiplexing (CO-OFDM) system has proved to be an
effective system that mitigates chromatic dispersion. When
the RCMN technique is incorporated with the system the
possibility of optical power fluctuation in fiber is largely
reduced. Phase modulation tends to keep the optical power
the same along the fiber and thus reducing the effects of
fiber nonlinearities. The possibility of intensity modulated
optical signal exacerbating the PAPR is thus eliminated. The
proposed PAPR reduction technique offers 3.7dB reduction.
Further this work can be extended into applying various
modulation schemes and different number of subcarriers.
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