Experimental Study of Fast Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Transmission over a Random Media Channel for Optical Wireless Communications

In this paper, a 4 amplitude shift keying (4-ASK) fast orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (FOFDM) scheme was experimentally investigated over a turbulent air–water channel for optical wireless communications. The experiment results showed that the 4-ASK-FOFDM modulated signals were not sensitive to weak atmospheric turbulence, and the bit-error rate (BER) was lower than the 7% forward error correction (FEC) limit of 3.8 × 10−3. Under the condition of the same spectra efficiency, the 4-ASK-FOFDM scheme just had a tiny performance penalty compared to the 16-QAM-OFDM scheme. Consequently, the 4-ASK-FOFDM scheme is a promising alternative to the conventional 16-QAM-OFDM scheme in optical wireless communications.