A full-duplex radio-over-fiber system based on dual quadrupling-frequency

We proposed and simulatedly demonstrated a novel full-duplex radio-over-fiber system using an external modulator and an optical interleaver to generate dual quadrupling-frequency optical millimeter waves for carrying two base station downstream data and wavelength reuse for uplink connection. The simulation results reveal that the power penalties for the downstream and upstream signals of both base stations are less than 0.8 dB. In this new scheme, the configuration of the both base stations is simplified further because there is no additional laser at two base stations. The frequency of local oscillator signal is reduced due to frequency quadrupling. The cost of the new system is largely reduced.     

Transmission performance of the optical mm-wave generated by double-sideband intensity-modulation

We have theoretically investigated the transmission of the optical mm-wave generated by the double-sideband (DSB) intensity-modulation. According to our analysis and simulation, the data signals, carried by DSB optical mm-wave after transmission along fiber, are degraded greatly because of the fading effect and the time shift of the codes caused by the chromatic dispersion in fiber, and these effects limit the transmission distance of the signals. Our theory is confirmed by the experimental results.     

The transmission performance of the single sideband optical millimeter-wave with BPSK signal in the duplex radio-over-fiber link

This paper has investigated the transmission performance of the single sideband (SSB) optical millimeter (mm)-wave with signal carried by the sideband in BPSK format in duplex radio-over-fiber (RoF) system theoretically and numerically. The SSB optical mm-wave signal is generated by a LiNbO₃ Mach–Zehnder modulator and there exists an optimal modulation index to generate the SSB optical mm-wave with a maximal RF photocurrent. The SSB optical mm-wave is much suitable for the duplex ROF link with the uplink lightwave recovered from the downlink because the optical carrier carries no signal. In such a duplex RoF link, although there are the spurs on the optical carrier, they have little influence on the downlink and the uplink signal even if the modulation index is large.     

64 GHz optical millimeter-wave generation by octupling 8 GHz local oscillator via a nested LiNbO3 modulator

A novel scheme to generate a 64 GHz optical millimeter (mm)-wave via a nested LiNbO₃ Mach-Zehnder modulator with an 8 GHz local oscillator is proposed and simulated. Since the frequency response of the modulator and the local oscillator frequency are greatly reduced, the bandwidth requirements of the optical and electrical components in the transmitter are significantly decreased. The simulation results show that the generated optical mm-wave signal maintains good performance even after being transmitted over 20 km standard single-mode fiber.     

A full-duplex radio-over-fiber link with 12-tupling mm-wave generation and wavelength reuse for upstream signal

A full-duplex radio-over-fiber (RoF) link with a novel scheme to generate 60 GHz mm-waves from a 5 GHz RF signal source is investigated. In the RoF downlink, the required frequency of the RF oscillator is reduced greatly. Since the optical carrier is not modulated by downstream data, part of it is reused to carry upstream data and the upstream data is transmitted to the central station using optical single-sideband modulation. In this way, a single wavelength is used for both downstream and upstream transmissions. Based on this scheme, a full-duplex RoF link is built and its transmission performance is analyzed. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation show that the downstream signal cannot only eliminate code form distortion caused by time shift of the code edges, but also reduce the influence of the fading effect as the 60 GHz DSB optical mm-wave signal is transmitted along the fiber, and the upstream signal is immune to both fading effect and time shift of the code edges.     

A full-duplex radio-over-fiber system based on a novel double-sideband modulation and frequency quadrupling

We propose a novel radio-over-fiber system based on double-sideband (DSB) modulation and frequency quadrupling to reduce the system cost both at central office (CO) and base station (BS). In this system, by properly biasing the intensity modulator, the repetitive frequency of the optical millimeter-wave (mm-wave) is four times frequency of the local oscillator (LO) signal. Additionally, due to the single-sideband of the mm-wave carrying base data signal, our theoretical simulation shows that the generated mm-wave can be immunized the fading effect and the walk-off of signals.     

Optical mm-wave generation by using external modulator based on optical carrier suppression

In this paper, we have theoretically investigated the transmission performance of the optical millimeter (mm)-wave generated by using an external modulator based on optical carrier suppression for the first time. According to our theory, the data signals carried by the optical mm-wave are transmitted in the dispersion fiber without fading but are degraded greatly because of the time shift of the code edges, which still limits the transmission distance. The experimental results agree well with our theory.     

A novel full-duplex radio-over-fiber system based on dual octupling-frequency for 82 GHz W-band radio frequency and wavelength reuse for uplink connection

A novel full-duplex radio-over-fiber system is proposed and demonstrated, in which an external modulator and an optical interleaver are used to generate dual octupling-frequency optical millimeter waves for two base stations and wavelength reuse for uplink connection. This scheme is simplified and low-cost because no additional laser is utilized for uplink connection at two base stations and one laser at central office works for two base stations simultaneously. The frequency of local oscillator signal is reduced largely due to frequency octupling. The theorem about how to generate optical millimeter waves is analyzed. The simulation results show that the bidirectional 5 Gb/s system has a perfect performance because the power penalty for the downlink and uplink signals of two base stations are less than 0.6 dB after successful transmission over 60 km standard single mode fiber.     

A full-duplex radio-over-fiber system using direct modulation laser to generate optical millimeter-wave and wavelength reuse for uplink connection

In this paper, we present a full-duplex radio-over-fiber system incorporating both optical millimeter-wave (mm-wave) generation and wavelength reuse for uplink connection. The optical double sidebands (DSB) signal is generated by using only one inexpensive broadband direct modulation laser (DML), to which a mixing RF signal is applied. An optical interleaver is then used to separate the first-order optical sidebands from the optical carrier of optical DSB signal. The separated first-order optical sidebands are beat to generate mm-wave signal that has double the frequency of the RF drive signal, while the separated optical carrier is reused as light source to remodulate uplink signal. Both detailed theoretical analysis and experiments to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system are presented. Experiment result shows that the bidirectional 2.5 Gb/s data can be successfully transmitted over 40 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) with less than 2 dB power penalty.     

Generation of optical carrier suppression millimeter-wave signal using one dual-parallel MZM to overcome chromatic dispersion

In this paper, we have proposed a novel approach to generate optical carrier suppression (OCS) mm-wave with signal only carried by one first-order sideband using a dual-parallel MZM in radio-over-fiber (RoF) system, and the transmission performance was also investigated. As the optical mm-wave signal is transmitted along the fiber, there is no time shift of the data symbols resulting from the group velocity dispersion in the fiber because the signal is only modulated on one sideband. The simulation results showed that the eye diagram keeps open and clear even when the optical mm-wave signals are transmitted over 96-km and the power penalty is about 1-dB after fiber transmission distance of 60-km, which is quite consistent with our theoretical analysis. Furthermore, the proposed OCS optical mm-wave generation approach is also used in a full-duplex RoF link based on wavelength reuse at the base station for the uplink due to another pure sideband without carrying data. The bidirectional 2.5-Gbit/s data is successfully transmitted over 40-km standard single mode fiber with less than 0.5-dB power penalty in the simulation. Both the unidirectional RoF downlink and the full-duplex RoF system have good performance.     

DSB optical mm-wave with signal only on optical carrier generated by embedded LiNbO3 Mach-Zehnder modulator

We have investigated the generation of the 40-GHz double-sideband optical millimeter (mm)-wave with signal carried only by its optical carrier via an embedded LiNbO₃ Mach-Zehnder modulator (LN-MZM). Since the optical carrier and its two first-order sidebands are dominant and their powers are well balanced, the first-order harmonic in the photocurrent gets maximal. As the optical mm-wave signal is transmitted along the fiber, there is no code outline distortion because the signal is only modulated on the optical carrier. Although the first-order harmonic shows the periodical fading effect when the optical mm-wave signal is transmitted along the fiber, its degradation on the radio-over-fiber link can be avoided by adjusting the position of the fading nodes via varying the main MZM bias voltage, and the signal still keeps much good eye diagram even after 50-km fiber transmission. The experimental results prove our theory.     

Simultaneous modulation and transmission of 10-Gb/s baseband and 60-GHz microwave signals in a radio-over-fiber system

A novel radio-over-fiber (ROF) scheme simultaneously to modulate and transmit 10-Gb/s baseband and 60-GHz microwave signals on a single wavelength using single-sideband (SSB) modulation technique is proposed and verified by simulation. The scheme is based on a Dual-Parallel Mach-Zehnder Modulator (DPMZM). The scheme can carry the microwave signals on either the upper sideband (USB) or the lower sideband (LSB) only and the baseband signals on the other sideband. The optical 60-GHz millimeter wave (mm-wave) carrier is generated by means of subcarrier-multiplexing (SCM) technique to carry 155-Mb/s baseband signals while 10-Gb/s baseband signals are imposed on the original optical carrier via SSB modulation. The signals with dual services are successfully transmitted over 50-km single-mode fiber.     

The transmission performance degradation of the optical millimeter-wave signals by fiber chromatic dispersion

The influence of the fiber chromatic dispersion on double sideband (DSB), optical carrier suppression (OCS), and single sideband (SSB) optical mm-wave signals is investigated based on the Taylor expansion of the propagation constant and is verified by simulation. According to our theoretical results, the fading effect suppresses the signal power of the DSB optical mm-wave periodically in a cosine-like pattern, and it can be described by the zero-order Taylor expansion of the propagation constant. For the optical mm-wave with the signal modulated on two or more tones, the bit pulses of the mm-wave signal are distorted by the dispersion-inducing bit walk-off effect between tones, which is expressed by the first-order Taylor expansion of the propagation constant. Moreover, as the signal rate and the transmission distance are increased further, higher-order Taylor expansion of the propagation constant still degrades the optical mm-wave signal even if both the fading effect and the bit walk-off effect are eliminated completely. The distortion of the signal pulses of SSB optical mm-wave is derived based on the second-order Taylor expansion of the propagation constant. This degradation is verified by the simulation with the eye diagram evolution of the SSB optical mm-wave signal.     

Influence of the modulation index of Mach-Zehnder modulator on RoF link with ASK millimeter-wave signal

In this paper, the influence of the modulation index of LiNbO₃ Mach-Zehnder modulator on the radio over fiber (RoF) link based on single sideband (SSB) optical millimeter (mm)-wave with ASK signal is theoretically and numerically investigated. Our investigation shows that there exists an optimal modulation index to generate the SSB optical mm-wave with a maximal RF photocurrent. Although the fiber dispersion distorts the code form and degrades the performance of the RF signal demodulated from the SSB optical mm-wave after fiber transmission, it does not cause the closure of the eye diagram. However, the influence of the fiber dispersion becomes more obvious as the modulation index increases. For the duplex RoF link with the optical carrier of the uplink recovered from the downlink, a larger modulation index of the downlink causes a worse crosstalk from the downlink to the uplink.     

High-repetitive frequency millimeter-wave signal generation using multi-cascaded external modulators based on carrier suppression technique

We have numerically and experimentally investigated how to generate high-repetitive frequency millimeter (mm)-wave using multi-cascaded intensity modulators based on optical carrier suppression (OCS) scheme. We have found the rule how to generate the high-repetitive frequency mm-wave by adjusting the repetitive frequency of the radio-frequency (RF) signals and the phase relation between the RF signals on the intensity modulators. Based on this rule, we have experimentally demonstrated to generate over 80 GHz optical mm-wave.     

Generation of radio signals using a novel Mach-Zehnder modulator with four arms

We have proposed and demonstrated a novel Mach-Zehnder modulation technique which employs a 1 × 4 multimode interference MMI coupler and four optical phase-modulator waveguides to generate optical single sideband (SSB) signals in radio-over-fiber (ROF) transmission link. It is shown that when the RF (radio frequency) modulation index is large, the optical SSB signal generated by conventional modulation scheme contains a significant part of undesired higher order harmonics, accordingly, much distortion in the RF signal was detected at the base station (BS). However, the main undesired higher order harmonics can be suppressed using our proposed modulation scheme and the performance of the transmission links were largely improved in single-channel and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) cases.     

A novel approach for simultaneous millimeter wave generation and high bit rate data transmission for Radio over Fiber (RoF) systems

We propose a novel method for simultaneous transmission of OC-192 (9.95328 Gbps) digital data and 60 GHz RF generation in a Standard Single Mode Fiber (SSMF) link utilizing Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS). The system comprises of a 1550 nm DFB Laser diode, Mach Zehnder modulator (MZM), 50 km SSMF and Optical receiver. The receiver includes laser diode for optical pump, a regenerator for data retrieval and a RF bandpass filter for RF generation. This system requires minimum number of RF and optical components for the generation of 60 GHz RF. The remotely generated 60 GHz RF signal may be used for wireless transmission of data. The entire link is simulated in Optisystem software to analyze the system performance.     

A novel optical SSB modulation scheme with interfering harmonics suppressed for ROF transmission link

A novel optical SSB modulation scheme for ROF transmission link is proposed in this paper, the scheme employs two parallel MZMs to generate an SSB signal with major high-order interfering harmonics well suppressed. The SSB signal generated by conventional modulation scheme is interfered by adjacent high-order harmonics, and such interference may cause distortion on the RF signal generated at the base station (BS). As major high-order interfering harmonics are well suppressed in the proposed scheme, the power of the generated RF signal can be avoided and the transmission performance of the ROF transmission link is largely improved.     

Performance limits of pico-cell systems using radio-over-fiber techniques with an electroabsorption modulator

We investigate the performance limits of a pico-cell system using the radio- over-fiber technique with an electroabsorption modulator (EAM) in a 2.4 GHz wireless local area network (WLAN) environment. To understand the performance limits of the system using an EAM as the optical transceiver, we vary the optical modulation index (OMI) of the transmitter for different bias voltages to the EAM. Power margins in the links are found to estimate a possible service range, and packet loss rates (PLRs) in the pico-cell system are measured to evaluate the transmission performance. The total service range can be extended up to 3 m by adjusting the OMI of the transmitter for different applied bias voltages to the EAM.     

Simulative investigation on the impact of laser-spectral width in single-tone radio-over-fiber transmission system using optical single side-band technique

In this paper, we analyzed the impact of laser-spectral width incorporating dual-electrode Mach–Zehnder modulator (DEMZM) in single-tone radio-over-fiber (RoF) transmission system by simulation setup. It is shown that an improvement in the measurement of received radio frequency (RF) power is achieved by reducing the laser line width from 100 MHz to 100 kHz, which further improves the BER rate and optical link by transmitting the information with low power. The results are calculated for 20 and 50 km optical single sideband (OSSB)–RoF transmission system by varying the chirp from 0 to −3 as it requires less bandwidth than optical dual sideband (ODSB)–RoF system and is tolerable for power degradation due to a chromatic fiber-dispersion, through a standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) carried by a continuous wave (CW) laser at 1550 nm of laser-spectral width varying from 100 MHz to 100 kHz with CW power of 10 mW that modulates a single RF channel of 20 GHz. Further, deployment of such lasers with OSSB scheme helps the telecom industry to reduce the designing cost of RoF communication systems.