JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 28, NO.

17, SEPTEMBER 1, 2010

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OFDM versus Single-Carrier Transmission for

100 Gbps Optical Communication
Alan Barbieri, Giulio Colavolpe, Member, IEEE, Tommaso Foggi, Enrico Forestieri, Member, IEEE, and
Giancarlo Prati, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractWe analyze the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique in long-haul next generation optical
communication links and compare it with the well-established
single-carrier (SC) data transmission using high-level modulation
formats and coherent detection. The analysis of the two alternative
solutions is carried out in the 100 Gbps scenario, which is commonly considered to be the next upgrade of existing optical links,
with special emphasis on quaternary phase-shift keying (QPSK)
modulations. The comparison between OFDM and SC takes into
account the main linear and nonlinear impairments of the optical
channel, e.g., group velocity dispersion (GVD), polarization mode
dispersion (PMD), self-phase modulation (SPM), cross-phase
modulation (XPM), and four-wave mixing (FWM), as well as
the phase noise due to transmit and receive lasers, their relative
frequency offset, other synchronization aspects, the overall complexity, the power and spectral efficiency, and the technological
constraints.
Index TermsCross-phase modulation (XPM), four-wave
mixing (FWM), group velocity dispersion (GVD), optical coherent
transmission systems, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), phase-shift keying (PSK), polarization mode
dispersion (PMD), self-phase modulation (SPM), single-carrier
transmissions.

I. INTRODUCTION

N the last decade, the huge growth of traffic on deployed

optical communication networks pushed the demand for a
more effective exploitation of the fiber channel capacity. The
next generation optical links are going to carry 100 Gbps per
wavelength [1], [2], since the increased traffic in IP-based networks is going to make the 100 Gb Ethernet (100 GbE) the future choice for high-speed long-haul optical communications.
OFDM is a well-established transmission technique [3], [4]
that stands out nowadays as a standard for many wireless [5]
and wired [6] communications. Its success mainly depends on
its capacity to effectively transform a time-dispersive channel
Manuscript received March 31, 2010; revised May 18, 2010, June 11, 2010;
accepted June 16, 2010. Date of publication June 28, 2010; date of current version August 18, 2010. The paper will be presented in part at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC10), Capetown, South Africa, May
2010. This work was supported by Ericsson AB.
A. Barbieri was with University of Parma, Dipartimento di Ingegneria
dellInformazione, I-43100 Parma, Italy. He is now with Qualcomm Corporation R&D, Qualcomm Inc., San Diego, CA 92121 USA.
G. Colavolpe is with University of Parma, Dipartimento di Ingegneria dellInformazione, I-43100 Parma, Italy.
T. Foggi is with CNIT Research Unit, I-43100 Parma, Italy.
E. Forestieri and G. Prati are with Scuola Superiore SantAnna, I-56124 Pisa,
Italy.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JLT.2010.2055041

into a set of independent and interference-free subchannels, so

as to allow the use of symbol-by-symbol (SbS) detection at the
receiver, rather than a complex maximum likelihood sequence
detector based on the Viterbi algorithm. Furthermore, in the
presence of an amplitude-selective frequency response, as in
wireless communications with multipath propagation, OFDM
achieves Shannon capacity through suitable power allocation
and bit loading, provided that the transmitter knows the channel
response, e.g., if a feedback channel is available [7], [8].
Motivated by these features, optical OFDM has been recently
investigated with both direct detection (DD-OFDM) [9] and coherent detection (CO-OFDM) [10]. The former allows for a simpler receiver structure, but has a worse energy and spectral efficiency, making it more suitable for cost-effective short reach applications [11], whereas the latter features superior performance
in long-haul high-data-rate transmissions, similar to single-carrier (SC) modulation formatsfor these reasons only coherent
OFDM will be considered in this paper.
High-speed optical coherent communication systems exhibit
several specific issues which may reduce the effectiveness of
OFDM with respect to SC formats. For instance, in the presence
of phase noise and residual uncompensated carrier frequency
offset, which are always present in high-speed optical communication systems [12], intercarrier interference (ICI) arises
among the OFDM subcarriers to such an extent that, if not
compensated, might lead to a remarkable performance degradation [13]. On the other hand, ICI compensation algorithms are
computationally quite demanding, and their implementation is
not feasible in such high-speed optical communication systems.
A possible alternative is the use of pulseshape techniques, in
which suitably designed pulses, with good time and frequency
localization properties, are employed with OFDM with the aim
of increasing its robustness to time-varying impairments (see,
e.g., [14], [15], and references therein). However, this technique
is nowadays not considered in optical communications for the
technological problems related to the generation of arbitrary
pulses at the transmitter. Furthermore, the large peak-to-average ratio (PAR) of OFDM signals is the reason for their large
sensitivity to nonlinearities in dispersion-managed systems
[16], [17]. Last, but not least, OFDM exhibits several energy
and spectral overheads, such as the overhead due to the cyclic
prefix (CP), and some technological drawbacks, such as the requirement of analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters
with an higher resolution than that required in SC systems. On
the other hand, SC transmissions require a fractionally-spaced
two-dimensional linear equalizer to compensate for linear
impairments (GVD and PMD) [18]. For a single carrier system,

0733-8724/$26.00 2010 IEEE

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this equalizer represents the most computational demanding

and technological challenging block.
Motivated by the above considerations, the aim of this paper
is to carry out an extensive investigation of the practical potential of OFDM for use over optical communication links at 100
Gbps, by means of both analytical characterization and computer simulations. Specifically, we will compare, in terms of
performance, complexity, and overall state-of-the-art feasibility,
an OFDM communication system with the single-carrier communication scheme described in [18], for which a parallel and
computationally efficient implementation is also discussed here
for better comparison with OFDM. In both cases we will assume the adoption of polarization multiplexing and a quaternary
phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulation format, as this is going
to be the format used in long-haul 100 Gbps links. We partly
anticipate here the main conclusion that we will draw after this
extensive analysis: although OFDM certainly has a lot of merits,
and in fact has been selected for several wireless communication
standards, in the considered high-speed optical communication
channel and with the optical and electronic devices available
today, it does not compare favorably to SC techniques, mainly
because the latter do not require digital-to-analog converters at
the transmitter. However, for higher transmission rates, SC systems could be forced to use still higher modulation formats,
which would increase the transmitter complexity, contrarily to
the OFDM case. A paper with similar aim has been recently
published [11]. Conclusion are quite similar, although we show
here novel and more detailed numerical results.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section II we present
a thorough literature analysis of both SC and OFDM systems
for optical communications. Then, in the following three
sections, we describe the three main impairments faced by a
high-speed fiber-optic system, namely linear time-invariant
distortions, linear time-varying distortions (mainly phase noise
and carrier frequency offset), and Kerr-type nonlinear distortions, along with their effects on communication and the ways
to overcome them. Technological drawbacks, computational
complexity analysis, and an analysis of the sources of energy
and spectral overheads for both techniques are presented in
Section VI. Numerical results are reported in Section VII and,
finally, considerations about the use of OFDM systems for
future high-speed optical communications will be presented in
Section VIII.
Notation: We denote vectors and matrices with bold and calligraphic-bold symbols, respectively. Whether a symbol refers
to a deterministic or a random quantity, is either clear from the
context, or explicitly specified. Lowercase letters are used for
time domain quantities, whereas capital letters are reserved for
frequency-domain ones.

Fig. 1. Receiver structure.

II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION

We consider long-haul optical transmissions using polarization multiplexing. In these systems, two independent data
streams are sent on two orthogonal states of polarization
(SOPs). Provided that a proper front-end is employed at the
receiver to extract two orthogonal polarizations, the optical
channel can be seen as a two-input two-output channel which,
in the linear regime, is described by a 2 2 transfer matrix

(Jones matrix). We consider the receiver as composed of an

analog opto-electronic (O/E) front end, devoted to signal demodulation and conversion from the optical to the electrical
domain, and a digital part devoted to electronic processing (see
Fig. 1). After a preliminary optical filtering, two orthogonal
SOPs are split through a polarization beam slitter (PBS). They
are then separately combined with the optical field of a local
oscillator laser (LO) in a 2 4 90 hybrid [19] and detected
with two balanced photodetectors. In this way, the two received
signals, one for each SOP, are converted in the electrical domain, in practice performing a frequency conversion. Denoting
the sampling interval, the samples at time
of the two
by
received signals are collected in a two-dimensional column
vector . Since a frequency estimation and compensation block
is required before detection for both SC and OFDM systems,
the samples at its output.
we will denote by vector
A. Single-Carrier (SC)
The SC system considered in this paper is described in detail
in [18]. As a discrete-time sufficient statistic is obtained through
oversampling, the main component is represented by a two-dimensional fractionally-spaced linear equalizer which, as shown
in [18] (where the most recent works on linear equalization for
coherent optical systems are reported and analyzed), is able to
perfectly compensate for GVD and PMD provided it has a sufficient number of taps. The adoption of the asynchronous strategies for detection and for the adjustment of the equalizer taps
described in [18] allows also to remarkably increase the robustthe
ness to phase noise. In the following, we will denote by
the number of past decinumber of equalizer taps and by
sions used by the asynchronous detection strategy [18], [20].

BARBIERI et al.: OFDM VERSUS SINGLE-CARRIER TRANSMISSION

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Fig. 2. Block diagram of an OFDM optical communication system.

Assuming, as in [18], that two samples per symbol interval

are employed, GVD and PMD will be perfectly compensated
is larger than or equal to the duration of the channel
when
impulse response.1
Although some of the implementation aspects, such as the
impact of a fixed-point implementation, have been addressed in
[18], other aspects will be further investigated here in order to
give a complete picture necessary for a fair comparison with
optical OFDM systems. In particular, we will describe how the
two-dimensional linear equalizer can be parallelized (using the
overlap-save technique [21]) and also implemented in the frequency domain for complexity-saving purposes.
B. OFDM
Several authors recently proposed using OFDM in high-speed
optical communication links as a possible alternative to standard
SC modulations [22][24]. The block diagram of an OFDM optical communication system without polarization multiplexing
is shown in Fig. 2. The extension to the case of polarization multiplexing is straightforward and can be found in [25], [26].
OFDM consists in modulating and demodulating blocks of
symbols, previously mapped into a given constellation, through
discrete Fourier transform (DFT), usually exploiting the efficient inverse and direct fast Fourier transform (IFFT/FFT)
algorithms [27]. Therefore, symbols in each block are modulated onto subcarriers, whose orthogonality ensures that
no intercarrier interference occurs, provided that the overall
channel is time-invariant. Thus, the transmitted signal, neglecting phase noise and frequency offset, can be remapped at
the receiver to the original constellation. It is straightforward
to understand how an adjustable allocation of the transmitted
signal to convenient subcarriers allows to avoid channel spectral dips, which could severely harm system performance [28].
And, in fact, ODFM with proper power allocation achieves
Shannon capacity.
1A non-integer number of samples per symbol interval would reduce the
number of equalizer taps but would require an interpolator after the equalizer.
This aspect will be discussed later.

In the optical communication literature, the investigation on

OFDM is motivated by its effectiveness in mitigating linear
channel impairments, such as group velocity dispersion (GVD)
and polarization mode dispersion (PMD), by simply setting a
proper cyclic prefix overhead and using a one-tap equalizer at
the receiver, and by the implicit parallelization of the processing
due to the IFFT/FFT operations, which clearly represents an advantage in high-speed optical links [25]. The optical channel
does not entail any changes in the principles of the OFDM techniquethe use of polarization multiplexing simply implies the
adoption of a couple of OFDM transmitters and a couple of FFT
blocks at the receiver with a two-dimensional 1-tap equalizer
[25], [26]. For this reason, most of the works published on optical OFDM deal with the experimental demonstration of different approaches and solutions to overcome technological issues [26], [29][31].
Through the use of virtual subcarriers, OFDM allows to easily
accommodate for transmit filters with a smooth transition band
[6]. It can be easily shown that the use of these virtual subcarriers is equivalent to oversampling, which is therefore easily
accounted for in OFDM systems. This is a main advantage in
OFDM with respect to SC schemes. With the commonly used
filters in optical systems, 20% of virtual subcarriers is typically
sufficient [32]. On the contrary, one of the most constraining
aspects in the design of an optical OFDM system is the generation of the analog waveform at the transmitter by means
of high-speed digital-to-analog converters (DACs). Nowadays,
the available technology does not allow the implementation of
single-band OFDM streams. The only way to implement a 100
Gbps optical OFDM transmission is therefore the parallelization
of transmit (and potentially receive) architecture, so that less
stringent bandwidth requirements can be managed by existing
optical components. In this direction, some works have been
published, addressing theoretical and experimental subcarrier
multiplexing (SCM), or multi-band OFDM, [26] and orthogonal-band multiplexing (OBM) [29], [33]. Basically, the technological limit is overcome by multiplexing different OFDM
sub-signals and reducing the guard-bands between sub-bands
by exploiting subcarrier orthogonality between different sub-

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bands, in the same way it is exploited in a single OFDM frame,

thus significantly reducing intercarrier interference. These techniques, although making a 100 Gbps OFDM transmission possible, imply an increase of hardware complexity, which should
be accounted for in a fair comparison with SC transmissions.
However, in the remainder of the paper a single-band OFDM
transmission is assumed, as it will not affect the analysis and
the main conclusions that will be carried out.
In optical communications, phase noise due to transmit and
receive lasers, as well as the presence of a residual uncompensated carrier frequency offset (CFO), are expected to degrade the
performance of OFDM, due to the fact that ICI arises in this scenario. A time-domain phase noise compensation, which avoids
the onset of ICI, was proposed in [12], based on the transmission of an unmodulated carrier within the band occupied by the
transmitted signal. If the phase noise is slow enough, ICI can
be neglected even without any explicit compensation, although
carrier phase must be anyway estimated [34][36].
The impact of fiber nonlinear impairments, such as self-phase
modulation (SPM), cross-phase modulation (XPM), and fourwave mixing (FWM), has also been addressed in the literature,
as it is known that, in dispersion-compensated links, the high
PAR characterizing OFDM signals has a more detrimental effect
on system performance than in SC transmission. In [37], [38],
it was proposed to exploit a phase compensation method from
[39] to mitigate the nonlinearities-induced phase distortions,
whereas in [40] and [41], the effectiveness of predistortion and
signal clipping at the transmitter against nonlinear impairments
was investigated. Some of these techniques involve a complexity
increase at the transmitter and/or the receiver. Finally, in [42]
the joint processing of two polarization components in polarization division multiplexed OFDM systems for more effective
SPM compensation and the impact of the dispersion map design on the performance was explored. In the presence of XPM,
it was also found that conventional OFDM channel estimation
schemes using time/polarization-interleaved training symbols
fails, and a new chennel estimator was developed to solve this
problem. In the following, we develop the analysis of the two
competing solutions, as said in the introduction.

amount of residual GVD and the amount or model (1st, 2nd,

or higher) of PMD [43]. Hence

III. TIME-INVARIANT LINEAR DISTORTIONS

We take into account a channel consisting of multiple spans of
SMF, with amplification and dispersion compensation after each
span. In the linear regime and in the absence of polarization-dependent loss, the signal is corrupted only by PMD, GVD, and
amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise. In general, depending on the dispersion map design, there will be a non-zero
(usually expressed in ps/nm). We
residual fiber dispersion
denote by
the 2 2 Jones matrix representing the two-dimensional frequency response of the channel, accounting for
both GVD and PMD and a possible constant unknown phase
shift due to the phase uncertainty of the transmit and receive
lasers.2 The fiber Jones matrix is unitary, irrespective of the
2The phase noise due to the transmit and receive lasers will be taken into
account later.

(1)
where is a 2 2 identity matrix.3 We will also denote by
the 2 2 channel impulse response matrix accounting not only
for PMD and GVD but also for digital-to-analog and analog-todigital converters (DACs and ADCs), as well as transmit and
receive filters, assumed, as in [18], such that no intersymbol
interference (ISI) arises in the back-to-back (b2b) case.4
The low-pass equivalent of the accumulated ASE noise on
two orthogonal SOPs can be modeled as a couple of independent
complex noise components, each with two-sided power spectral
the vector collecting
density (PSD) equal to . Denoting by
the transmitted samples on the same two orthogonal SOPs at
time and assuming perfect frequency compensation, the received samples can be expressed as [18]
(2)
where the two components of
are independent and identically distributed complex Gaussian random variables each with
[18],
being the sammean zero and variance
pling interval. In (2), as done in [18], we assumed a finite impulse response of length samples. However, we point out that
the impulse response of a fiber has, in principle, an infinite duration, although, since its energy is obviously finite, it decays
to zero for increasing values of . Hence, is chosen such that
the energy of the impulse response leaking outside the range
is negligible, according to some criterion.
A. Single-Carrier
As mentioned, being a SMF a frequency-flat channel in the
linear regime [see (1)], and for the above mentioned hypothesis on the transmit and receive filters, a two-dimensional linear
taps is able to perfectly compenequalizer with at least
sate for GVD and PMD [18]. This means that, contrary to what
happens in the case of frequency-selective wireless and wired
channels, where an optimal maximum-likelihood sequence detector involves the use of a Viterbi processor, a processing with
complexity linear and not exponential in is required. For the
same reason, there is no need to perform non-uniform power
allocation in order to achieve capacity. Hence, the main advantages of OFDM over SC do not hold in this case.
The straightforward implementation of the two-dimensional
linear equalizer, however, results in a non-parallel and computationally demanding architecture even for a limited number of
3In the following ( 1 ) and ( 1 ) denote transpose and transpose conjugate,
respectively.
4Rigorously, since PMD is a time-varying phenomenon, the system is linear
but not time-invariant. However, due to its slowly-varying nature [44], in SC systems it will be considered time-invariantthe algorithm for the adjustment of
the equalizer taps will take care of this. In OFDM systems, since the coherence
time of PMD is order of magnitudes larger than any practical OFDM symbol
duration [44], the channel impulse response will be considered invariant at least
over an OFDM symbol and will be denoted by
; m being the symbol index.

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2541

Fig. 4. Block diagram of a frequency-domain equalizer.

Fig. 3. Concept of a time-domain equalizer with overlap-save technique.

blocks of overlapping
samples are processed by
identical two-dimensional equalizers.

equalizer taps. It is known, in fact, that the time-domain straightforward implementation of a linear convolution between the
equalizer impulse response and an input sequence is not computationally convenient with respect to other, more sophisticated, methods even for a relatively short impulse response [21].
However, parallel processing and computational savings can be
achieved as follows.
1) Time Domain Equalization: Equalization can still be done
in the time domain, but by splitting the received data stream
into overlapping subblocks, thus implementing the overlap-save
technique [21], as shown in Fig. 3. Each subblock of
samples
is processed by one of
identical two-dimensional equalizers and overlaps by a number of samples that depends on the
and the number
of past decisions used
equalizer length
by the asynchronous detection strategy described in [18], when
samples is required for the
employed. In fact, an overlap of
transient of the equalizer (to fill the equalizer tapped-delay-line)
whereas it is possible to show, by computer simulations, that a
symbols, thus
samples, is refurther transient of
quired by the asynchronous detection strategy to provide no performance degradation. Hence, a parallel architecture at a lower
speed is obtained at the expense of hardware redundancy, latency, and a complexity increase, due to the need of a double
processing of the overlapping windows. This complexity in. However,
crease is related to the ratio
and the subblock length
since the degree of parallelism
are degrees of freedom, this ratio can be kept as small as desired. Notice that no overhead in terms of bandwidth or energy
is entailed and that, due to the fact that the channel is slowly
varying, all equalizers can employ the same taps and adaptation can be performed on one equalizer only. In other words,
no hardware redundancy is required for the circuitry necessary
to update the taps. The lower speed allows also to implement
interpolation techniques necessary to work with a non-integer
number of samples per symbol interval (in particular with less
than 2 samples per symbol interval), thus reducing the computational complexity.
2) Frequency Domain Equalization: Equalization can be
performed in the frequency domain (FD) [21], [45], [46],

as shown in Fig. 4. The above mentioned subblocks of

samples are transformed through FFT. Similarly, once the
equalizer coefficients are transformed, equalization can be
easily accomplished through a multiplication between transforms (performed by a 1-tap parallel equalizer similar to that
used in OFDM receivers). The corresponding output is then
transformed back again to the time domain for (asynchronous)
SbS detection. In this FD implementation of the equalizer for
SC transmissions, we have the same main hardware component
blocks (those implementing FFT and IFFT) used in OFDM, but
in this case they all reside at the receiver. In addition, since the
equalizer coefficients are updated in the time domain, a further
FFT block must be employed. This implies an increase in
complexity (although very limited since the equalizer taps must
be updated at a very low rate, being PMD a slowly-varying
phenomenon [44]) but has the advantage that the asynchronous
strategy for the adjustment of the equalizer coefficients [18]
can be adopted, thus remarkably increasing the robustness
against phase noise. In this case, since both OFDM and SC
with FD equalization mainly employ the same hardware components, complexity will be similar. This architecture has also
two other main advantages. First, very long equalizers can be
implemented, thus allowing to compensate for the whole fiber
dispersion (when dispersion-management is not employed) and
not only for the residual one. Then, this architecture allows
to manage in a simpler way a non-integer number of samples
that, in a time-domain implementation would have required an
explicit interpolator. In this FD implementation, interpolation
could be embedded in the FD equalizer [21]. As a conclusion,
this implementation architecture allows to remarkably reduce
the processing complexity of the SC transmission scheme.
B. OFDM
OFDM is an effective way to decompose a time-dispersive
channel into a set of independent and parallel subchannels [6].
Hence, when OFDM is employed and the cyclic prefix is long
enough to ensure perfect compensation of the dispersion (see
below), a trivial SbS detector can be used for data detection.
This is the reason for the recent widespread use of OFDM in
several wireless communication systems, where, as mentioned,
SC transmissions with SbS detection are not able to achieve
channel capacity.
We denote by
the frequency-domain complex modulation symbol associated to the -th subcarrier and the -th
OFDM symbol, with
, where
is
is a design parameter and must
the employed FFT size.
be carefully chosen according to several criteria, which will be
discussed in this and the next sections. Note that, in principle,
could belong to a different constellation, although
each

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we assume that QPSK is used for all subcarriers. In fact, the

optical channel being frequency-flat, the only reason for different power allocation and bit loading could be the imperfections in the frequency response of electrical and optical filters
[47], not considered here. Moreover, a few side subcarriers are
such that
sometimes turned off, namely it may exist
, for all
.
the length of the cyclic prefix, the timeIf we denote by
domain samples of the discrete-time transmitted signal are

to recover the
quency-domain complex vectorial samples
.
corresponding transmitted samples
We remark that, if either one of the conditions above does not
hold, (5) is no longer true and ICI appears among the subcarriers, i.e., some of the energy of each frequency-domain symbol
leaks on the neighbouring subcarriers. In this case, SbS detection is no longer optimal in the maximum likelihood sense, and
a large performance degradation might be expected if such receiver is still used. Interference cancellation algorithms have
been proposed to cope with this situation (see, e.g., [48][51]).
However, the computational complexity of the compensation algorithms is definitely unaffordable in the considered context,
due to the large signaling rate. Hence, these approaches will
not be considered here. Besides ICI, inter-OFDM-symbol interference also arises when the CP is shorter than the impulse
response. This entails a further performance degradation if such
an interference is not taken into account at the receiver.
From the above discussion, it reads clear that CP must be
long enough in order to avoid interference. On the other hand,
we remark that CP represents an overhead, since the time and
energy devoted to the transmission of the CP are wasted information-wise. In particular, the loss in terms of energy and
. In order
spectral efficiency is
to keep the overhead bounded to reasonable levels, it must be
, but since
for avoiding interfer, unless very
ence, we are forced to take large values of
small values of residual dispersions are considered. As we will
clarify in the next sections, there are several reasons to keep the
small. Hence, the choice of the design parameter
value of
is one of the most challenging problems when designing
an OFDM-based communication system. Due to the non-negligible computational complexity they add, we will not consider
here channel shortening equalization algorithms (see [52], [53]
and references therein), whose aim is to reduce the value of
so that
can be reduced as well.
In the overall OFDM channel model (5), channel coefficients
are unknown at the receiver, since they depend on the
random fiber dispersion. Usually, pilot symbols are periodically
introduced in the transmitted signal, and used by the receiver
for channel estimation and tracking. These symbols represent
a further source of overhead. An alternative approach, which
requires the insertion of pilot symbols at the beginning only, is
based on the use of a differential encoding across subcarriers
and the adoption of the detection strategy described in [20],
straightforwardly extended to the two-dimensional channel
model (5), after FFT at the receiver.6 In fact, a preliminary
channel estimation based on pilot symbols will allow to compensate for the contribution to the channel frequency response
due to GVDsince this contribution depends on , where
is the subcarrier index, it cannot be compensated for by the
detection strategy in [20]. On the contrary, the slowly-varying
fluctuations due to PMD can be easily compensated without the
need to resort to additional pilot symbols. Since the adoption
of differential encoding across subcarriers and of the detection

(3)
The continuous-time transmitted signal is obtained from the corresponding discrete-time sequence through a continuous-time
pulse, which includes explicit filtering, implicit filtering carried
out by the DAC and the amplifier, etc.5 The transmitted signal
also undergoes linear dispersive effects introduced by the fiber,
as well as all linear effects due to filtering and analog-to-digital
conversion at the receiver. As mentioned, all these effects are
in
embedded in the time-varying matrix impulse response
(2), which may change from one OFDM symbol to the next.
After CP removal, the discrete-time sequence is fed to an OFDM
demodulator, whose frequency-domain complex output symbols are

(4)
In order for OFDM to be effective in removing the intersymbol interference stemming from the dispersion (see (2)), in
addition to the above mentioned hypothesis that the impulse response must vary slowly enough so that it can be assumed constant over the duration of an OFDM symbol, CP must be longer
). In this case,
than the impulse response (i.e.,
combining (3), (2), and (4) it turns out that

(5)
where
are the frequency-domain additive noise samples
(still a white Gaussian process), whereas the frequency-domain
matrix channel response corresponding to the -th subcarrier
reads
(6)
From (5), it reads clear that the interference has been perfectly
removed, and a SbS detection can be carried out on the fre5The effect of quantization of the ADC and the DAC is not included in this
derivation.

6Differential encoding across subcarriers entails a double number of symbol

errors which translates in a loss of a few tenths of dB in terms of signal-to-noise
ratio, provided an advanced detection algorithm, such as that described in [20],
is employed.

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2543

strategy described in [20] also increases the receiver robustness

in the presence of slow phase noise, it will be always considered
in our simulation results.
IV. PHASE NOISE AND CFO
In coherent optical systems, transmit and receive lasers induce, on the received signal, a phase noise whose linewidth
ranges from a few hundreds kHz for external cavity lasers to
a few MHz for cheaper distributed-feedback lasers. At the same
time, it is necessary to take into account the presence of a nonnegligible residual offset after frequency synchronization, performed in the electrical domain in the intradyne receiver to benefit from the absence of expensive and problematic synchronization optical devices such as optical phase-lock loops (PLLs).
Phase noise and uncompensated CFO are the major limiting factors in coherent optical systems and, due to their similar nature,
they will be discussed together in this section.
In the presence of receive phase noise and/or a residual uncompensated CFO, the -th received vectorial sample reads
(7)
where

is the time-varying phase process, given by

B. OFDM
In the presence of a time-varying impairment, OFDM fails to
decompose the channel into parallel and independent subchannels. In particular, a time-varying channel impulse response7
destroys the orthogonality among the subcarriers, thus ICI
arises [55][57]. In such a scenario, if countermeasures are
not adopted, as discussed later, a performance degradation is
unavoidable. In fact, interference acts as a further source of
random noise, which, in certain circumstances, can be even
dominant with respect to the additive white Gaussian noise. On
the other hand, if the channel impulse response is almost constant over an OFDM symbol, ICI is certainly negligible. A well
known rule of thumb, widely employed to assess the potential
impact of ICI, is to evaluate the ratio between the channel coherence time, namely the time over which the channel impulse
response is almost constant (according to some criterion), and
the OFDM symbol duration. Larger values of this ratio entail
reduced impact of the ICI.
In a high-speed optical communication system, as the one
considered in this paper, there are mainly three linear timevarying distortions, namely PMD, phase noise, and CFO. While
PMD usually varies slowly enough so that the resulting ICI is
negligible, since its coherence time is orders of magnitude larger
than any reasonable OFDM symbol duration (see Section III.B),
phase noise and CFO might entail remarkable ICI due to their
relatively fast speed. In this case, the received vectorial sample
corresponding to the -th subcarrier can be written as

(8)
(9)
is the time-varying phase noise, which follows a
In (8),
denote a sequence of i.i.d. zeroWiener model (namely,
mean Gaussian samples, whose standard deviation depends on
is the residual CFO, which
the laser linewidth). Moreover,
is usually normalized with respect to the sampling frequency
.
A. Single-Carrier
The effects of phase noise and an uncompensated CFO on SC
optical coherent systems have been addressed in many works in
the latest 20 years. We recently proposed a receiver architecture for 100 Gbps intradyne coherent optical systems [18]. The
adoption of asynchronous strategies for SbS detection and for
the adjustment of the coefficients of the two-dimensional equalizer, not only significantly increases the robustness to phase
noise, but has also the convenient side effect of increasing the
robustness to an uncompensated frequency offseterrors up
are tolerated. Hence, before the two-dimensional
to
equalizer, a simple automatic frequency control (AFC) loop is
sufficient to guarantee the reduction of the residual frequency
offset to the desired values [18]. As shown in [18], this architecture is the most convenient one in terms of robustness to strong
phase noise and computational load. Other more robust and performing algorithms could be employed [54], but at the expense
of a non-negligible complexity increase. For this reason, the receiver architecture in [18] is considered here except that equalization is performed in the frequency domain for the above mentioned implementation advantages.

having omitted the OFDM symbol index for the sake of notation simplicity, since we assume that the CP is longer than the
impulse response duration, and assumed that no estimation and
compensation of phase noise and frequency offset is performed.
-periodic sequence of complex scalars , which deThe
, determines
pends on the sequence of phases
the amount of ICI. In particular, it turns out that
(10)
From (10) it reads clear that, in order to ensure absence of
ICI, namely
(being
the Kronecker delta), the
must be constant. On the contrary, (9) can be
phase process
rewritten as
(11)
represents the interference.
where
The impact of a residual CFO on the ICI can be easily characterized analytically from (10). In the absence of phase noise,
is constant in (8), it turns out that (we show
namely when
only the magnitude of the ICI coefficients)
(12)
7In this Section we assume a linear channel, thus neglecting possible nonlinear time-varying effects which will be taken into account in Section V.

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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 28, NO. 17, SEPTEMBER 1, 2010

Fig. 5. Magnitude of the coefficients

.
of the normalized CFO

1FT

9 , for N

= 256 and three values

In Fig. 5 we show the magnitude of , for

,
.
and for three values of
Clearly, the larger the CFO, the higher the amount of energy leaking from a subcarrier to the neighbouring subcarriers.
Hence, it is of paramount importance to ensure that the residual
CFO after the AFC is order of magnitudes smaller than the
. In
frequency separation between the subcarriers, i.e.,
other words, when OFDM is employed, either a more robust
AFC is used, able to reduce the residual CFO to the required
values, or the OFDM symbol duration must be reduced, so as to
increase the frequency separation among the subcarriers.
As opposed to the case of CFO, whose impact can be easily
studied in closed form, an analytical characterization of the ICI
in the presence of random phase noise is much harder. Although
some authors faced this problem (see, e.g., [13], [58], [59]), numerical simulations are usually unavoidable in this case. From
(10) and (11) it turns out that, in the presence of a time-varying
decreases,
phase, the magnitude of the signal coefficient
,
while the magnitude of the interference coefficients
grows. We evaluated the cumulative distribution function (cdf)
(namely,
), for
, a Wiener
of
phase noise with linewidth normalized to the symbol rate of eior
, and absence of CFO (namely,
ther
). In Fig. 6 the cdf of
is shown for the two considered linewidths.
As it can be seen, the slower the phase noise, the closer to 1
. On the other hand, for faster phase noise, the coefficient
sometimes can have a magnitude much smaller than one. Simiand
are shown
larly, in Fig. 7 the cdfs of coefficients
for the two mentioned phase noise linewidth values. In this case,
the coefficients are close to zero if the phase noise is slow, while
their magnitude can be significant for faster phase noise.
Even if the phase noise is sufficiently slow so that
and
, still the phase
introduces a rotation on all
transmitted symbols which must be taken into account. However, we point out that, by using the detection strategy described
in Section III.B, namely transmission of differentially encoded
symbols and the adoption of the asynchronous detection algorithm in [20] at the receiver, the constant (across subcarriers)

Fig. 6. Cdf of j

Fig. 7. Cdf of j

, for the two considered phase noise speeds.

and j

, for the two considered phase noise linewidth.

phase
is automatically taken into account without further processing.
Countermeasures to CFO and phase noise in OFDM systems
can be conceived either before or after the FFT block at the receiver (in the time or in the frequency domain). A compensation before FFT must be preferred since it allows (when perfect) to remove ICI. As an example, this can be accomplished by
sacrificing some of the data subcarriers to transmit an unmodulated pilot tone that, properly filtered, provides the required
reference for phase estimation and compensation [12]. In this
case, the power allocated to the unmodulated subcarrier must
be optimized. In fact, the higher its power, the more reliable
the carrier estimate, but also the higher the energy not associated to data (and hence wasted). In the numerical results related
to the performance of OFDM in the presence of phase noise
(Section VII.B), we will extract the pilot tone with the best possible filter, i.e., a PLL whose equivalent bandwidth is optimized
for the phase noise at hand.
Alternatively, one could work after the FFT block at the
receiver. Compensation of phase noise and CFO in this case
means ICI compensation through one of the algorithms proposed in the literature for such a purpose (e.g., see [48][51]).

BARBIERI et al.: OFDM VERSUS SINGLE-CARRIER TRANSMISSION

However, the computational complexity of these ICI compensation algorithms is definitely unaffordable in the considered
context, due to the large signaling rates.
V. NONLINEAR DISTORTIONS
Another important source of impairment for high-speed
optical transmissions are fiber nonlinear effects. The impact of
nonlinearities is more relevant for increasing signalling rates,
as it depends on the transmitted signal power. Basically, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) communications suffer
from distortions caused by the signal itself, like self-phase modulation (SPM), and by other adjacent channels, like cross-phase
modulation (XPM) and four-wave mixing (FWM) [60]. As
the impact of nonlinear effects increases with the transmitted
power, a trade-off must be found between the penalty given
by the ASE noise and the penalty given by nonlinear effects.
The transmitted power can be raised if techniques to mitigate
nonlinear effects are employed. Many works have been carried
out in this field; it is worth noting that unlike other optical
channel impairments which do not entail main differences from
wireless or wired channels, this effect is typical of fiber-optic
communications, and so are the derived mitigation techniques.
Most of these solutions, moreover, can be applied to both
OFDM and SC systems: optical conjugation [61], [62], backward propagation [63], nonlinear phase noise compensation
[39]. Each technique has its own merits and drawbacks, but,
since the scope of this work is a comparison between OFDM
and SC systems, the attention will be focused on their different
behavior in the nonlinear regime.
A. Single-Carrier
Nonlinear effects on SC modulations have been deeply investigated as a major source of impairment in WDM transmissions.
Since, as shown, linear effects in coherent optical systems can
be completely compensated for, nonlinear effects become one of
the most severe limiting factors in long-haul optical systems. As
mentioned above, we just focus the attention on the performance
of the proposed receiver for SC modulations, disregarding compensation methods common to both SC and OFDM systems.
B. OFDM
A well known drawback of OFDM, which has been widely
analyzed in the context of wireless communications, is its large
PAR, as opposed to SC modulations [64]. In other words, for
a given average transmitted power, the continuous-time OFDM
signal has a much larger dynamic range than any single-carrier
signal. While in a linear regime this characteristic does not affect system performance, in the presence of nonlinear fiber effects, which depend on the instantaneous power of the transmitted signal, a large performance degradation is unavoidable.
A trivial but usually ineffective way to overcome this problem
is the clipping of the transmitted signal [65], so as to reduce its
dynamic range. Besides the peak regrowth phenomenon which
arises when clipping is carried out on the discrete-time signal,
this approach has several severe drawbacks. First of all, the
power spectra of the transmitted signal may dramatically change
after clipping, an issue that in certain circumstances is unacceptable. For instance, in a multichannel communication system,

2545

a non-negligible energy could leak to neighbouring channels,

thus causing interference. Furthermore, clipping the time-domain signal is equivalent to adding a further pseudo-random
noise term to the frequency-domain received samples, in addition to the additive Gaussian noise. Although clip-noise estimation and compensation algorithms, to be deployed at the receiver, have been proposed in the literature (e.g., see [66]), their
complexity is unaffordable for high-speed optical systems. Unfortunately, since in order to effectively reduce the impact of
nonlinear effects a low enough clip level must be used, the resulting clip noise can completely destroy transmission.
Due to the above mentioned drawbacks of clipping, several
more advanced techniques, aiming at the reduction of the PAR
of an OFDM signal, have been proposed in the literature (see
[16] for a survey). Despite the remarkable research efforts toward effective PAR reduction techniques, all solutions have at
least one of the following quite serious drawbacks:
very limited PAR reduction performance (e.g., 12 dB in
practical scenarios);
energy and spectral overhead due to the introduction of
reserved subcarriers, that do not carry useful information,
but are used for PAR reduction only;
further noise at the receiver (as in the clipping approach);
transmission of a side information, which is required at
the receiver for correct detection of the transmitted OFDM
symbol. Besides the overhead it introduces, this side information must be highly protected by means of powerful
error-correcting codes, since even a single bit error for the
side information entails the complete loss of the whole
OFDM symbol;
a very large computational complexity increase, usually at
the transmitter side;
remarkable distortion of the power spectra of the transmitted signals.
Due to the above drawbacks, to the best of our knowledge,
the use of a PAR reduction technique when OFDM is employed
in optical communication systems has been proposed only in
[40] and the clipping approach seems to be the preferred way
for reducing the impact of nonlinear effects, although we point
out that a thorough performance analysis must be carried out
in order to ensure that the performance degradation due to clip
noise stays bounded. Finally, we would like to mention that
OFDM shows a better resilience to nonlinear effects in dispersion-unmanaged links, where the performance gap with respect to SC almost disappears, since the presence of a significant
amount of GVD has a useful impact on PAR. However, although
a benefit can be seen in the fact that dispersion maps could be
designed with more relaxed constraints, nowadays all installed
links are designed as to minimize the residual dispersion and,
moreover, a CP length as that needed in dispersion-unmanaged
links would heavily affect the energy efficiency of the system.
VI. COMPLEXITY, EFFICIENCY, AND TECHNOLOGICAL ISSUES
We already showed that there are several theoretical reasons
explaining why OFDM cannot exploit its potential advantages
with respect to SC modulations in optical channels. In addition, some further straightforward considerations on computational complexity and spectral or energy efficiency can be

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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 28, NO. 17, SEPTEMBER 1, 2010

drawn, which further support the thesis that no real benefits

come from using OFDM in SMFs, at least in the 100 Gbps
scenario.

in the optical domain or using an intermediate frequency (IF)

conversion stage, in the electrical domain [26].
Another aspect to be considered is that, due to the higher
sensitivity to phase noise, expensive narrow-linewidth lasers
must be employed. As opposed to SC, OFDM also exhibits
several overheads which remarkably reduce the spectral efficiency and/or the energy efficiency of the system. As discussed
in Section III.B, the CP wastes both energy and transmission
time (bandwidth), since it consists in data transmitted twice. As
shown, in order to avoid interference, the CP length cannot be
less than the impulse response length. On the other hand, due
to phase noise and CFO, the OFDM symbol duration must be
kept small enough so as to reduce the performance degradation
stemming from ICI. Therefore, the overhead due to CP cannot
be easily reduced, unless a complete redesign of the system is
considered.
Thanks to the adoption of differential encoding and asynchronous detection at the receiver, explicit channel tracking can
be avoided and the channel can be estimated only once through
pilot symbols, thus avoiding a further overhead. On the contrary,
the presence of a pilot carrier, used for phase noise compensation before FFT at the receiver side [12], represents another remarkable source of overhead since the relevant power is wasted
and some subcarriers must be turned off for its placement. In
addition, a filter able to extract it must be carefully designed in
order to avoid performance degradation.

A. Single-Carrier
The main difficulties for 100 Gbps SC transmissions reside at
the receiver, since at the transmit end a simple MachZehnder
modulator is sufficient, at least in the QPSK case. The received
signal must be oversampled to obtain a sufficient statistics, allowing for an effective signal processing. In a 100 Gbps polarization-multiplexed QPSK transmission, adopting the described
parallel architecture to implement the two-dimensional equalizer in time or frequency domain, using, as an example, an oversampling factor of 1.2 samples per symbol and neglecting the
unavoidable overhead due to forward error correction, only the
first receiver block, i.e., the automatic frequency control loop,
must process 30 Gsamples per second, whereas the remaining
blocks can work at a much lower speed due to parallelization. As
mentioned, the degree of parallelism is completely a degree of
freedom and can be chosen according to the implementation requirements only. Regarding the ADC resolution, 6 bits are sufficient to represent each (real or imaginary) component of the
received sample on each polarization [18]. A lower number of
bits can be adopted at a price of a performance degradation.
B. OFDM
One of the main issues when dealing with optical OFDM
is the availability of the required devices needed to effectively
implement both transmitter and receiver [24]. High-resolution DACs at the transmitter and ADCs at the receiver are in
general required, due to the fact that the transmitted OFDM
signal usually exhibits a very high dynamic range for a given
average power, and the quantization noise power must be kept
below other noise sources. DACs with at least
bits at the
transmitter [40] and ADCs with 8-bit resolution at the receiver
[6] are claimed to be necessary to have no performance loss, at
least in systems with inline dispersion compensation.8 Instead,
the requirement on the speed of ADCs is the same as in SC
transmissions, as using 20% of virtual subcarriers is equivalent
to an oversampling factor of 1.2 samples per symbol. These
converters are now becoming commercially available. The main
technological problem turns out to be the speed of the required
DACs at the transmitter. As a matter of fact, nowadays, implementing a clean OFDM modulation with a single IFFT/FFT
pair turns out to be not feasible, due to the unavailability of
DACs with the required speed and resolution. A 100 Gbps
OFDM transmission is rather implemented through some alternative solutions, like orthogonal band multiplexing (OBM) [33]
or subcarrier multiplexing (SCM) [30]. Here, the overall data
stream is split into several orthogonal sub-blocks for separate
OFDM modulations, each centered at different wavelengths,
with a proper choice of frequency offsets in order to exploit the
orthogonality of subcarriers across different sub-blocks. These
techniques clearly weigh on the cost and on the complexity
of the system, both at the transmitter and at the receiver, depending on the choice of multiplexing the sub-bands directly
8In systems without inline dispersion compensation, the effect of PAR reduction due to GVD can reduce the requirements on the ADC resolution [11].

VII. NUMERICAL RESULTS

We simulated a system with 4th-order Gaussian filters both
at the transmitter and at the receiver with a 3 dB bandwidth
. The SC system is designed according to [18].
equal to
In particular, we adopt the automatic frequency control loop
there described and the asynchronous strategies for detection
and for the adjustment of the equalizer coefficients, both using
past decisions [18]. The equalizer is implemented in
the frequency domain and works with 1.2 samples per symbol.
This oversampling factor was found to be sufficient to assure
no performance loss with respect to the b2b system. For a fair
comparison, the OFDM system has 20% of virtual subcarriers
and adopts the same asynchronous strategy after the two-dimensional one-tap equalizer. As mentioned, this is advantageous
both for estimating the channel frequency response and for increasing the robustness to phase noise (although it cannot compensate for the arising ICI).
A. Time-Invariant Linear Distortions
We consider the performance in terms of the
value
being the received signal
required to obtain a BER of
energy per information bit. In Figs. 8 and 9, performance is
of equalizer taps for the SC
plotted versus the number
for the OFDM system in cortransmission, and versus
. Two different links
respondence of different values of
at 100 Gbps were taken into account. In the case of Fig. 8, a
link with dispersion compensation having a residual dispersion
ps/nm and first order PMD, characterized by a power
splitting ratio between the principal states of polarization of
and differential group delay
ps, is considered.
The second link is without in-line dispersion compensation

BARBIERI et al.: OFDM VERSUS SINGLE-CARRIER TRANSMISSION

Fig. 8. Required E =N to obtain a BER equal to 10 for different values of

N (OFDM case) and L (SC case), in the presence of GVD and PMD (link
with dispersion compensation).

Fig. 9. Required E =N to obtain a BER equal to 10 for different values of

N (OFDM case) and L (SC case), in the presence of GVD and PMD (link
without dispersion compensation).

with
ps/nm (corresponding to 1200 km of stan, and
ps and the corresponding
dard fiber),
results are reported in Fig. 9. In all cases, the performance
and
increase and reaches the optimal
improves when
value, corresponding to a b2b transmission (excepting, in the
OFDM case, the energy loss due to the CP insertion), when
. For OFDM transmissions, an increase
in the number of subcarriers has also the beneficial effect of a
reduced ICI when the CP length is not sufficiently large. For
the link without in-line dispersion compensation we considered
since otherwise the overhead due to the
larger values for
CP would be significant.
B. Phase Noise and CFO
In Fig. 10 we consider, for the system with dispersion compensation mentioned above, the sensitivity of SC and OFDM
to an uncompensated CFO. In other words, the AFC of the SC
scheme is turned off and no pilot tones are transmitted in the
OFDM system to perform frequency estimation. No phase noise
has been added, i.e., a very narrow laser linewidth has been considered. Moreover, nonlinear effects are absent. Different values
are considered all with
. The value of
of

2547

Fig. 10. Performance degradation in the presence of a constant CFO.

required to obtain a BER of

is shown as a function of the uncompensated CFO
(values normalized to the
in the lower scale and absolute values with
symbol rate
reference to a QPSK-based polarization-multiplexed 100 Gbps
transmission in the upper scale). This figure allows to appreciate
the remarkable performance degradation due to the uncompen. In particular,
sated CFO, for a few different values of
the longer the OFDM symbols, the more sensitive the OFDM
system to the uncompensated CFO. On the contrary, the SC
scheme exhibits a larger robustness and thus lower-accuracy algorithms for carrier frequency estimation and compensation can
be employed.
In Figs. 11 and 12 we consider the effect of the receiver phase
noise, under the assumption of ideal CFO compensation, for
the above mentioned compensated and uncompensated links.
Transmit phase noise is neglected since it has usually a lower
impact on the performance. Different OFDM symbol durations
have been considered. The CP length is
for the compensated link and
for the uncompenwas accounted for in the
sated link. The overhead due to
for the compenSNR computation. For the SC system
sated link, whereas
for the uncompensated link. The
required to obtain a BER of
is shown as a function of phase noise linewidth (normalized values in the lower
scale, absolute values referred to a 100 Gbps transmission in
the upper scale). The above mentioned asynchronous SbS detection strategy is employed in the SC case, whereas for OFDM
we considered two cases. The first one is based on the compensation in the time domain (before FFT at the receiver) and
requires the transmission of a pilot tone (curves labeled with
PT) with optimized power. To insert the pilot tone, we turned
off 3% of the overall subcarriers and, as in [12], we inserted
in (3). As
the pilot tone in place of the subcarrier with
mentioned, the pilot is extracted by means of a PLL of optimized equivalent bandwidth. The second approach works after
FFT and is based on the adoption of the above mentioned asynchronous detection strategy after the two-dimensional one-tap
equalizer. This approach is therefore not able to compensate for
ICI and hence has a worse performance. It can be seen that the
robustness of OFDM depends on the symbol duration. In particular, the phase noise (but also the CFO) drives the system design

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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 28, NO. 17, SEPTEMBER 1, 2010

TABLE I
SMF AND DCF LENGTHS FOR EACH SPAN IN THE SIMULATED OPTICAL LINK

Fig. 11. Performance degradation in the presence of phase noise (link with
dispersion compensation).

Fig. 12. Performance degradation in the presence of phase noise (link without
dispersion compensation).

towards short symbols lengths, at least when the pilot tone is absent. Regarding the SC scheme, for both links the robustness is
higher than that observed in OFDM.
C. Nonlinear Distortions
We now compare SC and OFDM over an existing dispersion-compensated WDM link of about 1200 km, taking into account nonlinear effects. The link is composed of 14 spans of different length of standard SMF (dispersion of 16.46 ps/nm/km)
with, at the end of each span, a dispersion compensating fiber
ps/nm/km) and an inline single or
(DCF) (dispersion
dual stage optical amplifier (as reported in Table I). A fifteenth
span made up by just a postcompensation DCF is present. The
dispersion map is designed in order to leave a residual disperps/nm. In Fig. 13, we considered a SC
sion of about

Fig. 13. BER versus input power per channel of OFDM and SC systems in
a WDM scenario. The interfering channels are standard 10 Gbps on-off keying
(OOK) with 50 GHz spacing. Link length equal to 1200 Km, residual dispersion
equal to 100 ps/nm.

system using a two-dimensional equalizer with

and an
or 512 and
. The
OFDM system with
transmitted OFDM signal with
was also simulated using clipping at the trasmitter as proposed in [40], with
an optimized clipping ratio equal to 1.5 (this parameter represents the ratio between the maximum allowed peak value and
the signal root mean square value). The case of absence of adjacent channels is considered along with the case of a presence
of two adjacent 10 Gbps OOK channels. As expected, OFDM
exhibits a worse performance (see also [17]).
For the same link, but in the absence of DCFs, the performance is shown in Fig. 14 in both cases of absence or presence
of adjacent 10 Gbps OOK channels, but in this figure
for the SC system whereas
and
for
the OFDM system. For the link with DCFs we also evaluated
the effects of two adjacent 100 Gbps SC or OFDM systems on
a 10 Gbps OOK channel. The relevant performance is shown in
Fig. 15. In all figures, when present, interfering channels are
always launched at the same power of the observed channel
and the performance is shown as a function of the input power
per channel. In the considered link, several filters, multiplexers
and demultiplexers are envisaged, typically modeled as first- or
fourth-order Gaussian optical filters with 3 dB bandwidths in
to
.
the range
In the presence of inline compensation, (Fig. 13) there is,
as expected, a large advantage of SC over OFDM. However
this advantage is reduced when side channels are present, since
the effect of XPM prevails over SPM. In the case of absence
of inline compensation (Fig. 14), OFDM and SC provide almost the same performance, both in presence and in absence
of interferers. This is due to the beneficial spreading effect of
GVD which reduces the signal PAR. Finally, from Fig. 15 it is

BARBIERI et al.: OFDM VERSUS SINGLE-CARRIER TRANSMISSION

Fig. 14. BER versus input power per channel of OFDM and SC systems in an
uncompensated WDM scenario. The interfering channels are standard 10 Gbps
on-off keying (OOK) with 50 GHz spacing. Link length equal to 1200 Km,
residual dispersion equal to 20000 ps/nm.

2549

The main reasons that drive the interest in OFDM are the
simple compensation of linear impairments and the implicit parallelization given by the IFFT/FFT operations, which lowers the
processing speed at the receiver. As demonstrated, a proper design of a SC transmission system can provide the same benefits
without incurring in the tight constraints of OFDM in terms of
frequency and phase errors, in its penalty due to nonlinear effects, in its lack of spectral and energy efficiency, in its difficult
implementation due to technological limits.
A possible advantage of OFDM could be its scalability with
higher bit rates, but, as shown, it is almost impossible nowadays to implement a convenient OFDM system even for 100
Gbps. As a conclusion, there are nowadays significant technological limits to a cheap and convenient implementation of
OFDM, whereas SC modulations take advantage of a consolidated know-how and technology, relegating the efforts for realtime implementations only to the progress in the speed of optical and electronic devices.
REFERENCES

Fig. 15. BER versus input power per channel of an existing OOK systems in a
WDM scenario. The interfering channels are 100 Gbps OFDM and SC QPSK
with 50 GHz spacing. Link length equal to 1200 Km, residual dispersion equal
to 100 ps/nm.

clear that the OFDM system has a more detrimental effect on a

10 Gbps OOK channel.
VIII. CONCLUSION
The main advantage of OFDM, which made it a winning
technology for a large number of communication standards like
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and imperfections in the frequency responses of electrical and
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BARBIERI et al.: OFDM VERSUS SINGLE-CARRIER TRANSMISSION

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Alan Barbieri received the Dr.Ing. degree in telecommunication engineering

(cum laude) and the Ph.D. degree in information technology from the University
of Parma, Parma, Italy, in 2003 and 2007, respectively.
Since July 2009 he is with Qualcomm Corporate R&D Center, Qualcomm
Inc., San Diego, CA. Previously he was associate professor at the Scuola Superiore SantAnna, Pisa, Italy, after holding a post-doc position at the Dept.
of Information Technology, University of Parma. In 2007 he was a visiting
scholar at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, University of
Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. During summer 2008 he was a visiting
faculty at the Qualcomm Corporate R&D Center, Qualcomm Inc., San Diego,
CA. His main research interests include digital transmission theory and information theory, with particular emphasis on channel coding, iterative joint detection and decoding algorithms, estimation of unknown parameters and algorithms for synchronization. He participates in several research projects funded
by the European Space Agency (ESA-ESTEC) and important telecommunication companies.

Enrico Forestieri (S91M92) was born in Milazzo, Italy, in 1960. He received

the Dr. Ing. degree in electronics engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa,
Italy, in 1988. From 1989 to 1991 he has been a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Parma, Italy, working on optical communication systems. From 1991
to 2000 he was a Research Scientist and faculty member of the University of
Parma. Since 2001 he is with Scuola Superiore SantAnna di Studi Universitari
e di Perfezionamento, Pisa, Italy, where currently he is Professor of Telecommunications. His research interests are in the general area of digital communication theory and optical communication systems, with special attention to adaptive optical and electronic equalization, channel coding, and advanced modulation formats for optical systems. He is the leader of the Optical Transmission
Theory and Techniques area at the Integrated Research Center for Photonic
Networks and Technologies (IRCPhoNeT), Pisa, Italy. His research activity has
led to numerous scientific publications in leading international journals and conference proceedings, as well as a few patents. In 2004 he was General Chairman
of the Tyrrhenian International Workshop on Digital Communications.

Giulio Colavolpe was born in Cosenza, Italy, in 1969. He received the Dr. Ing.
degree in telecommunications engineering (cum laude) from the University of
Pisa, Italy, in 1994 and the Ph.D. degree in information technologies from the
University of Parma, Italy, in 1998.
Since 1997, he has been at the University of Parma, Italy, where he is now
an Associate Professor of Telecommunications. In 2000, he was Visiting Scientist at the Institut Eurcom, Valbonne, France. His main research interests
include digital transmission theory, adaptive signal processing, channel coding
and information theory. His research activity has led to several scientific publications in leading international journals and conference proceedings and a few
industrial patents. He is also coauthor of the book Detection Algorithms for
Wireless Communications, with Applications to Wired and Storage Systems
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2004). He is currently serving as an Editor for
the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS and as an Executive
Editor for the European Transactions on Telecommunications. He received the
best paper award at the 13th International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM05), Split, Croatia, September
2005 and the best paper award for Optical Networks and Systems at the IEEE
International Conference on Communications (ICC 2008), Beijing, China, May
2008. He is also the principal investigator of several research projects funded by
the European Space Agency (ESA-ESTEC) and important telecommunications
companies.

Giancarlo Prati (M81F03) was born in Rome, Italy, on November 13, 1946.
He received the Dr. Ing. degree in electronics engineering (cum laude) from the
University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 1972.
From 1975 to 1978 he was Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at
the University of Pisa. From 1978 to 1979 he was on a NATO-supported Fellowship Leave in the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern
California, Los Angeles working in optical communications. In 1982 he was
Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. From 1976 to 1986 he was a
Research Scientist of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) at the Centro
di Studio per Metodi e Dispositivi di Radiotrasmissione, Pisa. From 1986 to
1988 he was Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Genoa,
Italy. From 1988 to 2000 he was Professor of Telecommunications Engineering
at the University of Parma, Italy, where he served as Dean of the Engineering
Faculty from 1992 to 1998. He is now Professor of Telecommunications at the
Scuola Superiore S. Anna in Pisa, Italy. Currently he is President of CNIT,
Italian Interuniversity Consortium for Telecommunications, incorporating 35
Universities. From 1997 to 2006 he was a Member of the Technical Program
Committee of the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC).
His professional and academic interests are in telecommunication systems and
digital signal processing in communications. The activity has focused on optical
communications and radiofrequency communications, with application to satellite communications, high-capacity terrestrial digital radio links, mobile radio,
modems for switched telephone lines, fiber communications.

Tommaso Foggi was born in Parma, Italy, on May 7, 1978. He received the
Dr. Ing. degree in telecommunications Engineering and the Ph.D. in information technology from the University of Parma, Parma, Italy, in 2003 and 2008,
respectively.
From July 2003 to July 2004 he was granted a CNIT scholarship at Photonic
Networks National Laboratory, Pisa, and another CNIT scholarship from July
2005 to July 2006 at Dipartimento di Ingegneria dellInformazione (DII), Universit Degli Studi di Parma, Parma. Since June 2009 he is now a research fellow
of National Inter-university Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT), after
holding post-doc collaboration contracts with University of Parma, CNIT and
Scuola Superiore SantAnna in 2008 and 2009.
His main research interests include digital signal processing for optical communications, i.e., equalization, estimation and compensation techniques, advanced modulation formats, detection algorithms and receiver design. His activity also contributed to several research projects funded by the Italian Ministry
of Education, University and Research (MIUR) or by International companies.