Photonic generation of 60 GHz-band vector signals for RoF systems based on optical vector signal down-conversion

A novel photonic method of 60 GHz-band vector signal generation for RoF systems based on optical vector signal down-conversion is proposed and experimentally demonstrated in this paper. In the proposed method, the target vector signals are first generated in the optical domain with the help of mature commercial optical devices and then directly distributed to the base stations (BSs) through the fiber link. The generated vector signals can be automatically down-converted to the 60 GHz band in the BSs after O/E conversion, and then directly transmitted to the users without any further processing. With the proposed method, higher spectrum efficiency and system capacity will be obtained compared with the traditional OOK RoF systems while almost no extra system complexity and cost is brought in. According to the characteristics of different types of vector signals, two particular modulation schemes are provided, which are then verified by corresponding simulations and experiments. In the experimental 60 GHz RoF system, the 622 MSym/s 60 GHz-band 8-QAM and 4-QAM signals generated with two different schemes respectively are successfully transmitted over 50 km SMF and 5 m wireless channel without any compensation, and the power penalty are both about 1.7 dB at the BER of 10^− 9.