DC and non-DC biased optical filter bank multicarrier communication for IM/DD channel

This paper proposes two filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) schemes for optical communication in intensity modulation direct detection (IM/DD) channel with and without direct current (DC) bias. The aim is to overcome some inherent drawbacks of the commonly used optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) schemes. Key transceiver principles are designed to accommodate the requirements of IM/DD channel. Various performance metrics are analyzed and compared with optical OFDM schemes. It is found that the proposed schemes are more spectral and power efficient than their optical OFDM counterparts. In addition, the DC-biased optical FBMC scheme fully supports asynchronized multiuser uplink transmission, which is another pronounced advantage over the optical OFDM schemes that require stringent synchronization to maintain orthogonality. The analysis is confirmed by simulations. The findings may shed light into potential research line on FBMC based IM/DD optical communications.