Design and Performance Evaluation of OFDM- Based Wireless Services Employing Radio over Optical Wireless Link

This paper studies an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless services employing Radio over Optical Wireless (RoOW) to get a high performance transmission while eliminating the drawback of possible radio wave interference to electro-medical apparatus in indoor communication system. An optical Intensity-modulated Direct-detection (IM/DD) system using RF subcarrier modulation is considered and OFDM RF signals are assumed as the subcarrier. The transmission performance is evaluated by simulation considering the influence of peak clip of OFDM signal and different radio fading scenarios. Simulation result shows that the modulation index m, optical transmit power, radio environments are important factors which affect the communication performance significantly. It also shows when the received optical power is larger than -20dBm, which is a very practical power level, the value of BER becomes almost independent of the optical power and the radio environment becomes more important. That means the indoor optical wireless communication (OWC) has high transmission performance and the proposed relay system is a very available system as long as the radio environment is eligible. We believe that the proposed system is a practical system and can provide a low-cost, high-quality wireless services for RF sensitive areas.