IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 9, NO.

6, JUNE 1997

845

Error Performance of OFDM-QAM in Subcarrier Multiplexed Fiber-Optic Transmission

Qun Shi, Senior Member, IEEE
AbstractError performance of OFDM-QAM signals is analyzed for subcarrier multiplexed (SCM) ber-optic video transmission, particularly for hybrid AM/OFDM systems. In comparison with conventional -QAM signals, it is shown that the OFDM system provides signicant performance improvements in terms of bit-error rate (BER) , channel capacity, and operating range of the optical modulation depth, in the lightwave SCM environment where both the clipping impulse noise and Gaussian noise are present. As a result, the OFDM signals will introduce less interference effects on the nominal AM channels than the -QAM signals under the same operating conditions.

negligible BER differences as compared to the accurate model. This gives even simpler performance assessment for OFDM. II. OFDM CHARACTERISTICS AND BER MODEL In principle, an OFDM signal consists of a multiple of independently modulated QAM subchannels which are orthogonal in frequency and narrow band, and can be demodulated with a bank of orthogonally spaced match lters [6]. In practice, the modulation and demodulation of an OFDM signal can be effectively achieved through fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) [4]. Because of this concurrent transmission of many narrowband carriers in OFDM, the symbol duration of an OFDM signal may be much larger than that of the conventional singlecarrier -QAM signal. This gives an inherent advantage for OFDM to deal with any short time-domain interferences, such as an impulse noise [4]. For -QAM, the impulse noise may destroy one or several symbols. But, for OFDM, the impulse noise may only affect a small fraction of an OFDM symbol, thereby resulting in little effect on the signal quality. It is now well known that both the clipping impulse noise and Gaussian background noise are present in the hybrid analog/digital SCM ber-optic link and they are the main contributing factors for evaluating the digital performance. The performance analysis model for OFDM in such a noisy environment is shown in Fig. 1, where the OFDM reception is assumed to be matched-lter demodulation. Here, the clipping noise is similarly modeled as an impulse train following Poisson characteristics and exhibits shot noise effect after the matched lter detection [2]. Thus, following the same approach as given in [2] and [7], we can obtain the probability density function of the clipping noise and the BER model of OFDM combining both the clipping and Gaussian noise. For an OFDM with -QAM modulated subchannels, the BER can be obtained by [2], [7]

Index TermsBit-error rate, error analysis, FFTs, frequency modulation, optical modulation depth, quadrature amplitude modulation, subcarrier multiplexed.

I. INTRODUCTION -QAM signals are attractive for hybrid multichannel analog/digital subcarrier multiplexed (SCM) beroptic video transmission, because of their advantages in spectral efciency and noise immunity over their analog counterparts. However, they may suffer signicant performance degradations, as a result of the clipping impulse noise effect induced in such SCM environments [1][3]. Recently, an alternative digital modulation technique has been considered to be equally feasible for digital video transmission [4], primarily because of its inherent immunity against impulse noise and multipath effects. This technique is called the orthogonal frequency division modulation or multiplexing (OFDM), because it involves a multiplexing of multiple low data rate subchannels, each of them being independently modulated with conventional QAM symbols. Recently, the biterror-rate (BER) performance of OFDM in hybrid AM/OFDM lightwave system has been studied to some extent, showing a BER improvement over the QAM signal [5]. Here, based on an alternative model, we attempt to provide more in-depth analysis on the performance of OFDM-QAM signals vis-` -vis a -QAM, in the hybrid AM/OFDM ber-optic environment, in terms of system parameters such as BER, system capacity, and operating range of the optical modulation depth (OMD). In addition, we also show the effect of OFDM on the AM channels. The model herein presented is simpler in performance calculations than the previous one which requires numerical integration. Further, we show that the Gaussian approximation for OFDM in dealing with the clipping impulse noise gives
Manuscript received November 22, 1996; revised February 12, 1997. The author is with the Panasonic Technologies, Inc., Communication Systems Technology Laboratory, Princeton, NJ 08540 USA. Publisher Item Identier S 1041-1135(97)04063-9.

(1) is the clipping index per OFDM symbol where interval, is the variance ratio of the Gaussian noise to the clipping noise (i.e., , SNR , SNR being the total signal-to-noise ratio, and

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IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 9, NO. 6, JUNE 1997

Fig. 1. Performance analysis model for OFDM in the clipping noise and Gaussian noise environment for hybrid AM/OFDM SCM ber-optic transmission.

. The SNR is given by SNR RIN (2) where is the OFDM signal bandwidth, is the effective OMD per OFDM signal, is the received optical power, is the receiver thermal current, is the electron charge, is the photodetector responsitivity, and RIN is the laser relative intensity noise. The variance of the clipping noise is given by [2] , where is the mean duration of the clipping impulses (which is given by , being the OFDM symbol interval) and , being the per-channel OMD of AM, and being the total numbers of AM and OFDM channels, respectively. From (1), it follows that as , the OFDM BER approaches the Gaussian BER model. The value of can be obtained by [2]

Fig. 2. The BER of OFDM versus the effective OMD of OFDM. The hybrid system consists of 65 AM channels and one OFDM signal. The AM spectrum runs from 55.25439.25 MHz. The OFDM signals is at 600 MHz with B 6 MHz. The other parameters: a 0.25. Po 0 dBm.  0.9 A/W. in 10 pA/ Hz. RIN 155 dB/Hz.

=0

= =

(3) with being the number of the OFDM subchannels or the FFT size. In (3), we assume that the AM channels have a at spectrum over the band ( ) and the OFDM channels have a at spectrum over the band ( ). Evidently, when is large, will be large and the Gaussian BER approximation prevails. This is indeed the case when we employ FFT for OFDM demodulation and apply the central-limit theorem for large . III. OFDM PERFORMANCE AND DISCUSSION A. BER Performance We rst consider the BER behavior of OFDM for a hybrid system having 65 AM channels occupying the spectrum from 55.25439.25 MHz and one OFDM signal at 600 MHz. The OFDM signal has 1024 subchannels and uses 64-QAM for each subchannel. The OFDM BER, obtained from (1), versus the effective OMD, , of OFDM is shown in Fig. 2, where various optical parameters are given. For comparison, the BERs obtained based on [5], a single-carrier 64-QAM, the Gaussian approximation, and the no clipping cases, are also shown. As expected, The OFDM shows a signicant BER improvement when compared to the single-carrier QAM (e.g., a 12-dB gain for a BER of 10 ). The Gaussian approximation

gives little difference in BER from the model of (1); the observed differences are less than 0.5 dB in OMD for a given BER. Further, the OFDM BER model produces less than 2 dB OMD penalty with respect to the no clipping case. Additional calculations, not shown here, indicate that the higher order terms ignored in (1) yield negligible results. Finally, the result given here and that of [5] show similar improvements. Clearly, the number of the OFDM subchannels or the FFT size, , will inuence the performance of the OFDM. The effect is also illustrated in Fig. 2 for different numbers of subchannels. As seen, the OFDM performance degrades as reduces. Hence, to maintain the required performance of OFDM, must be large. There is a tradeoff, however. Too large the size may increase the accuracy requirement for the carrier recovery of the OFDM demodulation [4]. It is noted that for very small (e.g., 16), 1 may happen. In this case, the BER model of [2], valid for 1, may have to be used instead of (1) above. B. Channel Capacity and OMD Operating Range The BER improvement with OFDM increases the channel capacity and the dynamic operating range for the digital channels. In Fig. 3, we compare the channel capacities of the OFDM and the single-carrier 256-QAM for a specied BER of 10 . For this case, we consider 70 AM channels and multiple digital channels. From Fig. 3, one can observe that for the conventional 256-QAM case, only about 25 channels can be accommodated. For the case of OFDM, however, there is virtually no capacity limit. In Fig. 4, we show the operating OMD range for the cases of OFDM and 256-QAM. Here, we consider 70 AM and 80 digital channels. The gure shows that for a BER of 10 , the operating OMD range of OFDM is about 21 dB ( 0.4%4.6%), while for QAM it about 1.2%2.4%). Further, in this case, the 256-QAM 6 dB ( has only a minimum BER of 5 10 , whereas the OFDM produces a minimum BER 10 .

SHI: ERROR PERFORMANCE OF OFDM-QAM IN SUBCARRIER MULTIPLEXED FIBER-OPTIC TRANSMISSION

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Fig. 3. The number of digital channels versus the digital effective OMD for BER 1007 . The hybrid system consists of 70 AM channels and a number of digital channels. The other parameters: ma 0.041; Po 0 dBm;  0.85 A/W; in 10 pA/ Hz; RIN 160 dB/Hz.

=0

Fig. 5. The AM CNR and CNLD versus the number of the digital channels for BER 1007 . The other conditions and parameters are the same as those used in Fig. 3.

IV. CONCLUSION We have presented an in-depth performance analysis for OFDM-QAM signals corrupted by clipping impulse noise and Gaussian noise, for hybrid AM/OFDM SCM ber-optic transmission. The results presented have shown that the OFDM technique provides much better performance than the conventional -QAM scheme in terms of BER, channel capacity, operating OMD, and the effect on AM, in impulsive noise environments. The improvements can be attributed to the fact that the OFDM utilizes the narrow-band multicarrier modulation and spreads the duration across the channels, so as to stretch out the duration of the impulse noise and make it behave like a Gaussian noise to the system. Hence, an OFDM signal is inherently immune to an impulse noise effect. The improvements also suggest that the OFDM signal may need a simpler error correction code than an -QAM signal in similar environments when considering other noise and distortion effects. Finally, the model and the Gaussian approximation presented herein provide simpler calculations than the previous model, in evaluating the OFDM performance. REFERENCES
[1] K. Maeda, H. Nakata, and K. Fujita, Analysis of BER 16QAM signal in AM/16QAM hybrid optical transmission system, Electron. Lett., vol. 29, pp. 640642, Apr. 1993. [2] Q. Shi, Asymptotic clipping noise distribution and its impact on M -ary QAM transmission over optical ber, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 43, pp. 20772084, June 1995. [3] S. Ovadia, H. Dai, C. Lin, W. T. Anderson, Performance of hybrid multichannel AM/256-QAM video lightwave transmission systems, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 7, pp. 13511353, Nov. 1995. [4] Y. Wu and B. Caron, Digital television terrestrial broadcasting, IEEE Commun. Mag., pp. 4652, May 1994. [5] Q. Pan and R. J. Green, Bit-error-rate performance of lightwave hybrid AM/OFDM systems with comparison with AM/QAM systems in the presence of clipping impulse noise, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 8, pp. 278280, Feb. 1996. [6] R. W. Chang, Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, U.S. Patent 3 488 445, 1970. [7] R. E. Ziemer, Character error probabilities for M -ary signaling in impulsive noise environment, IEEE Trans. Commun. Technol., vol. COM-15, pp. 3244, Jan. 1967.

Fig. 4. The operating ranges of the digital effective OMD for 70 AM and 80 digital channels and for specied BERs. The other conditions and parameters are the same as those used in Fig. 3.

C. Effects on AM Channels The OFDM signals also produce less effects on the performance of AM channels than the QAM signals, since they can operate at a smaller signal power or OMD for a required BER. An exemplied case is given in Fig. 5, where the AM carrier to noise ratio (CNR) and the carrier to nonlinear distortion ratio (CNLD) are plotted against the number of the digital channels (256-QAM or OFDM) for BER 10 . Notice that for 256QAM, the AM CNR, and CNLD may drop as low as 610 dB, but for OFDM they may drop only on the order of 1.5 dB. Finally, we should point out that an OFDM signal has a higher peak-to-average ratio than an -QAM signal, due to its large number of subchannels with random amplitude and phase. This would normally require the OFDM to operate at high-power back-off to reduce the nonlinear effect [4]. For the hybrid system, however, this requirement is satised, since the OFDM signal can operate at the level much below the required back-off based on the BER and the more stringent AM power requirements.