Performance improvement of a SOA-based coherent optical-OFDM transmission system via nonlinear companding transforms

Coherent-Optical OFDM systems are known to be sensitive to large peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) at the transmitter output, due to nonlinear properties of some components involved in the transmission link. In this paper, we investigate the impact of an amplification of such signals via a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA), considering some recent experimental results. An efficient tradeoff between BER performance, computational complexity and power efficiency is performed by a proper design of Wang's nonlinear companding function, considered for the first time in an optical communication context. A BER advantage of around 3 dB can hence be obtained over a standard system implementation not using PAPR reduction. The designed function also proves to be more efficient than μ-law function, considered in the literature as an efficient companding scheme.