A Bidirectional RoF System for the Multi-Band Signal with Mitigation of the Nonlinear Effects

Abstract

A bidirectional full duplex radio over fiber (RoF) system is proposed for multi-band signal generation and transmission. A multi-band signal is generated at the central station (CS), which includes 10 GHz baseband, 40, and 70 GHz millimeter-wave (mm-wave) by optical frequency multiplication technique of radio frequency (RF) local oscillator (LO) with frequency of 15 GHz. The simultaneous transmission of the 16-QAM OFDM-based multi-band downlink signal and 4-QAM uplink signal over a single fiber is demonstrated. The carrier for uplink transmission is extracted from the unmodulated downlink signal with tunable FBG which is modulated by OFDM-based 4-QAM uplink data obtained from the user end via an antenna. The frequency reuse from the downlink signal makes the base station (BS) free from the laser source. At the user end, the multi-band signals for multi-serve application are obtained by heterodyne beating of multiple bands. An increase in launch power induces fiber dispersion and non-linearities like self-phase modulation (SPM) and cross phase modulation (XPM), which depends on the nonlinear refractive index of the fiber. Different industrial standard fibers with common specifications and modulation format along with co-shared components are deployed, and system performance is analyzed. The stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) can be mitigated by optimizing the launch power within the SBS threshold. The nonlinear effects are minimized at the system level without the requirement of additional digital signal processor (DSP) . The theoretical and simulation analysis shows that the designed bidirectional RoF link exhibits an improved system performance for bidirectional transmission with negligible power penalty.