Constant Envelope Coherent Optical OFDM Based on Fast

Hartley Transform
J. M. Fàbrega1, Member, IEEE, M. Svaluto Moreolo1, Member, IEEE, G. Junyent1,2, Member, IEEE
1
Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), Av. C. F. Gauss 7; 08860 Castelldefels (Spain)
Tel: (+34) 93 645 29 00, e-mail: jmfabrega@cttc.cat
2
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC-BarcelonaTech), Jordi Girona, 1-3; 08034 Barcelona (Spain)

ABSTRACT
In this paper the authors discuss the feasibility of a constant envelope optical OFDM based on fast Hartley
transform. The digital signal processing output drives an optical phase modulator for obtaining a 0 dB PAPR
signal at the transmission side, whereas the use of a Hartley transform increases power efficiency and relaxes the
level of the constellation used. Additionally, a set of simulations of the system are presented, showing a back-to-
back sensitivity of -34.6 dBm for a 10-3 BER.
Keywords: Coherent systems, optical OFDM, phase modulation.

1. INTRODUCTION
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has emerged in the optical communications field because
of its promising capabilities for transmission link reconfiguration and dispersion compensation, which are
thought to be the main challenges of next-generation optical networks [1]. Among all the proposed OFDM
designs, the so-called coherent optical OFDM techniques are able to improve the spectral efficiency, while
extending the transmission reach, thanks to their capability to recover all the information of the received optical
field (magnitude, phase and polarization).
Nevertheless, one of the main drawbacks of these coherent optical OFDM systems is their inherently higher
Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) [2], which reduces the non-linear tolerance in comparison to the
standardized optical QPSK for the 100 Gb/s systems [3]. In 2008, a novel technique, called constant envelope
OFDM, has been proposed to overcome the limitations due to the high PAPR of the OFDM signals [4].
Recently, this technique has been applied to optical OFDM [5-6]. Basically, it proposes to transmit a phase
modulated optical output by the signal processing block.
Along a different line, the Fast Hartley Transform (FHT) has been proposed as an alternative transform for
increasing the power efficiency in optical OFDM systems using Intensity Modulation and Direct Detection
(IM/DD) [7]. Its main advantages include the capacity of generating real-valued OFDM signals without the need
of the Hermitian symmetry constraint, required by the systems based on the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). This
means that the FHT can support the double of the input symbols of a standard Discrete Multi-Tone (DMT)
system, using a simpler implementation with lower size constellations.
In this paper the authors discuss the feasibility of a constant envelope optical OFDM based on the Hartley
transform. Its design and implementation are described, as well as its possible applications. Furthermore, a set of
results is presented in order to evaluate its performance.

Figure 1. Transmission scheme of constant envelope coherent optical OFDM based on FHT.
2. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
The proposed transmission system scheme is shown in Figure 1. The transmitter has two main parts: the Digital
Signal Processing (DSP) and the optoelectronic hardware modules. The input data is first parallelized and
mapped onto a real constellation (e.g. BPSK) by the DSP. Then, a training symbol sequence is added and the
inverse transform is performed using the same routine of the direct transform, thanks to the self-inverse property
of the Hartley transform. The resulting OFDM symbol is serialized. After the DSP, a Digital-to-Analog
converter (DAC) drives a Phase Modulator (PM) excited by a laser. Finally, an optical amplifier can be included
for achieving a higher output power.
Similarly, the optical receiver can be divided into two main blocks: the optoelectronic front-end and the digital
signal processing. The optoelectronic front-end is a standard intradyne receiver featuring phase diversity, where
the optical input signal is interfered with a local laser (LO) in a 2x4 90º hybrid. The local laser is assumed to be
locked in polarization and wavelength with the received optical signal by means of the corresponding automatic
frequency and polarization controls (not shown). The output signals of the hybrid are detected by two balanced
detectors, whose I and Q outputs are digitized by an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC). Then, the DSP module
parallelizes the incoming samples and performs the OFDM demodulation and data detection. This block first
performs a carrier recovery to compensate phase and frequency errors, and then it extracts the argument of the
received signal from its I and Q components by means of a look-up table. Afterwards, the OFDM demodulation
is performed. After performing the Hartley transform, the training symbol (TS) is removed and the channel can
be estimated in order to efficiently equalize the received signal. After equalization, the received signal is
serialized, driving the data decider.

3. EXPECTED PERFORMANCE
Since the modulation is based on the FHT and the bit sequence is mapped into a real constellation, the OFDM
symbols are real valued and all the carriers can support data symbols. Hermitian symmetry is not required and
the same data sequence at the same bit rate as FFT-based O-OFDM can be transmitted using a real constellation
[7]. In the system proposed in [6], a QPSK modulation is used; half of the subcarriers do not support
independent data due to the Hermitian symmetry constraint, whereas for the same implementation using Hartley
transform, similar performance are achieved using a simple BPSK modulation.
As coherent detection is used, signal/signal mixing is much lower than LO/signal mixing at the receiver side
[1]. Therefore, unlike OFDM systems based on IM/DD, there is no need for a guard band and a higher spectral
efficiency is achieved. An example can be seen in Figure 2, where it is shown the spectrum of the proposed
transmission system, using a BPSK encoded data stream at 10 Gb/s. Please note that by transmitting one bit per
symbol, the symbol rate is 10 Gbaud/s.

Figure 2. Spectrum of the constant envelope signal: at the optical transmitter (left), and In-Phase (middle) and
Quadrature (right) components after reception.
In Figure 2, we can observe that for achieving the proposed 10 Gbaud/s symbol rate, only components with
5 GHz bandwidth are used. This would be desirable in a metro-access network environment, where the data rate
requirement is medium-low and coherent systems have been already proposed for reaching higher power budgets
while covering longer distances [8]. In order to increase the bit per symbol ratio, and thus the data rate, larger-
size constellations can be used. In this case, only real modulation formats are allowed, e.g. mPAM. However,
with a polarization-diverse receiver, the polarization dimension can be also exploited to increase the information
density. For example, a polarization multiplexed version of the proposed system featuring 8PAM coding allows
achieving a bit rate of 120 Gb/s (20 Gbaud/s per polarization), by using optoelectronic components with only
10 GHz bandwidth.
A big problem in coherent systems is the laser phase noise. In this case, it becomes particularly relevant, as the
received useful signal is carried by the phase component. For a large number of subcarriers (≥64), the OFDM
encoded signal, after the IFHT block at the transmitter, can be accurately modelled as a Gaussian random
process, according to the central limit theorem [1]. Then, a simple phase noise estimator (e.g. a common phase
estimation [9]) would interpret the OFDM encoded signal as an additional noise degrading the data
demodulation.
Figure 3 (left) shows an example of the phase spectrum after the reception, the signal is a phase noise of
10 MHz is considered. Figure 3 (right) shows the signal of Figure 3 (left) at the output of an FHT block with
N=64. As expected, the phase noise affects the subcarriers at the edges of the OFDM symbol (i.e. in the
neighbourhood of subcarrier 1 and subcarrier 64 of the proposed example), while the subcarriers in the middle of
the OFDM symbol are almost not affected. Thus, in order to avoid the phase noise, we set to zero the first m
carriers and the last m ones (from N-m to N). The introduction of this overhead is at the expenses of the data rate,
since the FHT inputs supporting data are N-2m. The choice of the m parameter depends on the total number of
subcarriers, the transmitted symbol rate, and the total phase noise to be cancelled. First results show that a BPSK
based system running at 10 Gb/s with an overhead of only 3.1 % is enough for compensating 1 MHz linewidth
with less than 1 dB power penalty at 10 -3 BER. These performances are similar to those presented in [6], but with
increased power efficiency thanks to the use of FHT.

Figure 3. Example spectrum of the phase at the local oscillator output for a 10 MHz phase noise (left) and its
corresponding signal after the FHT block designed for 64 subcarriers (right).

4. SIMULATION RESULTS
The simulations to analyze the performance of the proposed system are performed using Matlab software.
Specifically, a pseudorandom data sequence of order 15 and length of 2 17 bits is generated, running at 10 Gb/s.
This bit stream is BPSK encoded, parallelized and OFDM modulated by using an FHT of order N=64. The
resulting signal is injected into an ideal phase modulator. The model used for the optical source driving the phase
modulator is an ideal continuous wave laser centered at 1550 nm, giving an output power of 0 dBm. As the
phase modulator does not include any kind of insertion losses, the output power of the proposed transmitter was
also 0 dBm.
The optical channel block is modelled as a variable optical attenuator (VOA) for sensitivity measurements. At
the receiver, the local oscillator is also modelled as an ideal laser centered at 1550 nm with output power of
1 mW, giving -6 dBm to each photodetector after the 90º hybrid. The linewidth is 1 MHz, whereas the laser at
the transmitter does not introduce any phase noise to the system. The photodetectors have been modelled as PIN
diodes with responsivity of 0.7 A/W, dark current of 1 pA and thermal noise of 11.51 pA/sqrt(Hz). After
intradyne detection, OFDM decoding and data demodulation are performed. At the output, the parameter
measured is the statistical counting of the received bits, which provides the best measurement of the system Bit
Error Ratio (BER).
Additionally, a standard 1 tap equalizer [2] is implemented, using one training symbol each 2048 OFDM
symbols. No cyclic prefix is added, as only a back-to-back configuration is analyzed. For the proposed linewidth,
a total of 4 subcarriers are set to zero (m=2), corresponding to an overhead of 6.3 %.
The sensitivity of the back-to-back system is shown in Figure 4. Assuming that Forward Error Correction
(FEC) is used and implemented by a standard RS(255,239) featuring an overhead of 6.7 %, the total overhead is
13.4 %. This ensures almost error free transmission after correction for an input BER of 10 -3. For this case, the
back-to-back performance shows a sensitivity of -34.6 dBm. If a stronger FEC coding is used, a target BER of
2·10-2 could be envisaged [10], at the expenses of an increasing of the total overhead up to 32.4 %. In this case,
the sensitivity is -38.2 dBm. As the transmitted power is 0 dBm, Figure 4 can also be read as the back-to-back
power budget. Therefore, depending on the choice of the FEC coding, the power budget is 34.6 dB and 38.2 dB,
respectively.

Figure 4. Back-to-back sensitivity and power budget.

5. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper it has been demonstrated the feasibility of a constant envelope optical OFDM based on Hartley
transform. The real OFDM signal is obtained by Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and it is transmitted by phase
modulation in the optical domain. Thus, a signal with constant envelope is transmitted, achieving an optimum
PAPR of 0 dB. The system performance is evaluated and results of the back-to-back system show sensitivities of
-34.6 dBm at 10-3 BER with only 13.4 % of total overhead. The expected performances are similar to those
described in previous work [6], but with higher power efficiency and much simple digital signal processing.
Even the evolution of coherent optical OFDM techniques has been mostly focused to long-haul networks, the
development of simple and efficient techniques featuring high performances, like the one presented in this paper,
also places them as an excellent candidate for the metro-access segment.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was fully supported by the Spanish MICINN project DORADO (TEC2009-07995).

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