In this paper, for the first time, the transmission performances of long-haul 100-Gb/s direct detection optical OFDM (DDO-OFDM) and coherent optical OFDM (CO-OFDM) wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) systems are compared by simulation. It provides specific guides for system parameter selection to get a high-performance and cost-effective OFDM WDM system. Specifically, the comparison involves three aspects: launched power is investigated to achieve better system performance; laser linewidth

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... numerically investigated to choose cost-effective laser; system dispersion tolerances with different laser linewidths are analyzed to further reveal the advantages and disadvantages of these two detecting methods, direct detection and coherent detection, in long-haul OFDM WDM system.