Decision-directed iterative methods for PAPR reduction in optical wireless OFDM systems

In this paper, we propose two iterative decision-directed methods for peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction in optical-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (O-OFDM) systems. The proposed methods are applicable to state-of-the-art intensity modulation-direct detection (IM-DD) O-OFDM techniques for optical wireless communication (OWC) systems, including both direct-current (DC) biased O-OFDM (DCO-OFDM), and asymmetrically clipped O-OFDM (ACO-OFDM). Conventional O-OFDM suffers from high power consumption due to high PAPR. The high PAPR of the O-OFDM signal can be counteracted by clipping the signal to a predefined threshold. However, because of clipping an inevitable distortion occurs due to the loss of useful information, thus, clipping mitigation methods are required. The proposed iterative decision-directed methods operate at the receiver, and recover the lost information by mitigating the clipping distortion. Simulation results acknowledge that the high PAPR of O-OFDM can be significantly reduced using clipping, and the proposed methods can successfully circumvent the clipping distortions. Furthermore, the proposed PAPR reduction methods exhibit a much lower computational complexity compared to standard PAPR reduction methods.