A PAPR reduction technique using Hadamard transform combined with clipping and filtering based on DCT/IDCT for IM/DD optical OFDM systems

•A joint PAPR technique based on Hadamard and clipping and filtering is proposed.•The proposed technique is experimentally demonstrated over 100 km fiber optic.•An end-to-end signal processing is theoretically investigated.•The proposed technique can reduce significantly the PAPR of the OFDM signals.•The received sensitivity is improved by more than 3 dB when the launch power is 10 dBm.

In Intensity Modulator/Direct Detection (IM/DD) optical OFDM systems, the high peak-to-power average ratio (PAPR) will cause signal impairments through the nonlinearity of modulator and fiber. In this paper, a joint PAPR reduction technique based on Hadamard transformation and clipping and filtering using DCT/IDCT transform has been proposed for mitigating the impairments in IM/DD optical OFDM system. We then experimentally evaluated the effect of PAPR reduction on the bit error rate (BER) performance and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique. At a bit error rate (BER) of 1 × 10−3, the receiver sensitivity of the proposed 2.5 Gb/s IM/DD optical OFDM system after 100-km standard single-mode fiber transmission has been improved by 0.8 dB, 1.3 dB and 3.1 dB for a launch power of 6.4 dBm, 8 dBm and 10 dBm respectively when compared with the classical system.