Patent ID: 8718160

Claim:
An optical communication method, comprising: performing modulation on the obtained bit stream data, so as to generate modulated signals; performing differential encoding on the modulated signals, so as to generate differentially encoded signals; converting the differentially encoded signals into electrical signals; and mapping the electrical signals onto optical carriers, so as to generate optical signals for transmission, wherein, the electrical signals are multi-carrier signals, the step of performing differential encoding on the modulated signals so as to generate the differentially encoded signals comprises: performing differential encoding on the same sub-carrier of adjacent symbols in the modulated signals if the differential encoding is performed in time domain; or performing differential encoding on the adjacent sub-carriers of the same symbol in the modulated signals if the differential encoding is performed in frequency domain, and if the differential encoding is performed in time domain, the method further comprises: performing serial-to-parallel conversion on the modulated signals so as to convert the modulated signals into parallel signals before the differential encoding is performed; and performing inverse Fourier transformation, cyclic prefix addition and parallel-to-serial conversion on the differentially encoded signals so as to generate differentially encoded OFDM data signals after the differential encoding is performed.