As one of optical wireless Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems, there is Flip-OFDM, which separates an OFDM signal into positive and negative parts and transmits them. It has good power efficiency and low hardware complexity. However, the system halves transmission efficiency compared with Direct Current-biased Optical OFDM. In this paper, Circular Polarized Optical OFDM (CPO-OFDM) is presented. This system separates OFDM signals into positive and negative parts, and it converts these signals into left-handed and right-handed polarization, and it multiplexes these signals. CPO-OFDM is analyzed with an intensity modulation/direct detection channel model which considers the change of the state of polarization owing to free space propagation. As a result of the analysis, it is shown that CPO-OFDM is a flexible system like the conventional systems by using circular polarization and it has the equivalent bit error rate (BER) and the double transmission efficiency compared with Flip-OFDM. The IM/DD channel model which considers the degree of polarization (DOP) is also shown. As for the DOP, it improves by the increase of the propagation distance. Thus, we can achieve the equivalent BER obtained with a high DOP laser even if we use a low DOP laser.

Circular Polarized Optical OFDM (CPO-OFDM) is a system that applies OFDM to optical wireless communications. This system separates OFDM signals into positive and negative signals and converts these signals into left-handed and right-handed polarization and then multiplexes the resulting polarized signals. In CPO-OFDM, the separated signals must be combined at the receiver. Then, as a noise-reduction method, the comparison method compares the signal amplitudes of the positive and negative signals and uses the signal having the larger amplitude as the received signal. However, if we use the comparison method when the received signals have background light, the combined signals are distorted. In the present paper, we herein report a method by which the receiver estimates the amplitude of the background light and then removes the background light, which is easily accomplished. Furthermore, we also report a theoretical method for analyzing the bit error rate (BER). We develop a closed form of the theoretical formula for the BER in an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. By using this formula and through numerical integration, we investigate the theoretical BER for a scintillation channel. We compare the results of the theoretical analysis with those of the simulations. As a result, the theoretical BER is generally coincident with the BER obtained through simulation. Even if we use the closed-form formula, we can derive the BER with sufficient accuracy.