A novel millimetre-wave band radio-over-fiber system with dense wavelength division multiplexing star architecture

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel millimeter-wave (mm-wave) band radio over fiber (RoF) system with dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) star architecture. Two lasers with a small wavelength difference, phase locked and polarization-aligned, are allocated at a central station (CS) for connecting the CS and each base station (BS); one laser is used for transmitting light and the other for the remote local oscillator. For the conceptual illustration, we consider a DWDM RoF system with a channel spacing of 12.5 GHz and radio frequency (RF) of ~30-GHz mm-wave band. In the downlink system, a single-side band (SSB) subcarrier is used with low RF imposed onto an optical carrier at the CS, and an mm-wave band RF signal is obtained at each BS using direct photo-detection by the SSB subcarrier beat with the remote oscillator. In the uplink system, the received mm-wave band RF signal at each BS is imposed onto the two optical carriers simultaneously, one optical carrier with the closest SSB subcarrier is optically filtered out and fed into in the uplink transmission fiber without frequency interleaving; the electrical signal with a low intermediate frequency can be photo-detected directly at the CS. Such a RoF system has simple, cost-effective and maintenance reduced BS's, and is immune to laser phase noise in principle.