Augmenting the spectral efficiency of enhanced PAM-DMT-based optical wireless communications

The energy efficiency of pulse-amplitude-modulated discrete multitone modulation (PAM-DMT) decreases as the modulation order of M-PAM modulation increases. Enhanced PAM-DMT (ePAM-DMT) was proposed as a solution to the reduced energy efficiency of PAM-DMT. This was achieved by allowing multiple streams of PAM-DMT to be superimposed and successively demodulated at the receiver side. In order to maintain a distortion-free unipolar ePAM-DMT system, the multiple time-domain PAM-DMT streams are required to be aligned. However, aligning the antisymmetry in ePAM-DMT is complex and results in efficiency losses. In this paper, a novel simplified method to apply the superposition modulation on M-PAM modulated discrete multitone (DMT) is introduced. Contrary to ePAM-DMT, the signal generation of the proposed system, termed augmented spectral efficiency discrete multitone (ASE-DMT), occurs in the frequency domain. This results in an improved spectral and energy efficiency. The analytical bit error rate (BER) performance bound of the proposed system is derived and compared with Monte-Carlo simulations. The system performance is shown to offer significant electrical and optical energy savings compared with ePAM-DMT and DC-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM).