Polarized OFDM for wireless optical communications

Abstract

DC biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) and asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) modulation schemes can be used for high data rate wireless optical communications. However they require relatively high bandwidth and/or transmit power. By combining OFDM and polarization shift keying (PolSK), we proposed a novel polarized OFDM (P-OFDM) scheme to improve bandwidth and/or power efficiencies and still preserve the benefits of OFDM and PolSK. Theoretical analyses and numerical results suggest that P-OFDM has improved power efficiency and/or bandwidth efficiency compared with DCO-OFDM and ACOOFDM and achieved better error performance than traditional on-off keying (OOK) scheme.