Filter-bank based efficient transmission of Reduced-Guard-Interval OFDM

We propose a new way to structure the digital signal processing for reduced guard-interval (RGI) OFDM optical receivers. The idea is to digitally parallelize the processing over multiple parallel virtual sub-channels, occupying disjoint spectral sub-bands. This concept is well known in the optical or analog sub-carrier domains, but it turns out that it can also be performed efficiently in the digital domain. Here we apply critically sampled uniform analysis and synthesis DFT filter bank signal processing techniques in order to realize a novel hardware efficient variant of RGI OFDM, referred to as Multi-Sub-Band OFDM (MSB-OFDM), reducing by 10% receiver computational complexity, relative to a single-polarization version of the CD pre-equalizer. In addition to being more computationally efficient than a conventional RGI OFDM system, the signal flow architecture of our scheme is amenable to being more readily realized over multiple FPGAs, for experimental demonstrations or flexible prototyping. (C)2011 Optical Society of America