From DC-Biased to DC-Informative Optical OFDM

We propose a novel modulation scheme for intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) based optical communication system employing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). This method utilizes the DC-bias, which typically is discarded at the receiver-end, to carry information to achieve higher power efficiency. By formulating and solving a convex optimization problem, a constellation in high dimensional space is designed offline for the input of the transmitter-side inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) block. We point out that one can choose partial or full DC power for information transmission. Under the condition that the spectrum efficiency is fixed and attainable, this method bears notable power gain over traditional DC-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM).