We present different distortionless peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction techniques that can be easily applied, without any symmetry restriction, in direct-detection (DD) optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (O-OFDM) systems based on the fast Hartley transform (FHT). The performance of DD O-OFDM systems is limited by the constraints on system components such as digital-to-analog converter (DAC), analog-to-digital converter (ADC), the Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) and electrical amplifiers. In this paper, in order to relax the constraints on these components, we propose to symmetrically clip the transmitted signal and apply low complexity (LC) distortionless PAPR reduction schemes able to mitigate, at the same time, PAPR, quantization and clipping noise. We demonstrate that, applying LC-selective mapping (SLM) without any additional transform block, the PAPR reduction is 1.5dB with only one additional FHT block using LC-partial transmit sequence (PTS) with random partitions; up to 3.1dB reduction is obtained. Moreover, the sensitivity performance and the power efficiency are enhanced. In fact, applying LC PAPR reduction techniques with one additional transform block and a 6 bit DAC resolution, the required receiver power for 8 dB clipping level and for a 10-3BER is reduced by 5.1dB. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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