A simplified radio over fiber balanced system with suppression of both second- and third-order nonlinear distortions

Abstract

We present a simplified radio over fiber balanced system that uses only one wavelength, optical modulator and fiber. In this balanced system the upper and lower sidebands produced by subcarrier modulation along with its optical carrier are separated before balanced photodetection. Optical time delays are introduced to one of the sidebands by means of two cascaded tunable nonlinearly chirped fiber Bragg gratings. The first nonlinearly chirped fiber Bragg grating produces relative time delay that has the following relationship τ delay ∝ 1/2f, while the second produces a relative time delay of τ delay ∝ 1/f. The first nonlinearly chirped fiber Bragg grating will have a large enough bandwidth and group velocity dispersion to introduce a relative time delay for the subcarrier and second order distortion, while the second will have the bandwidth and group velocity dispersion to introduce a different relative time delay for the third order distortion. The net effect of the relative time delays is to provide a phase shift of π for the subcarrier, second order distortion currents and a phase shift of 2π for the third order distortion current. Simulated results show a suppression of 2nd and 3rd harmonic distortion of 25.4 dB and 2.6 dB, respectively. In the case of 2 nd and 3 rd intermodulation distortion suppression of 33 dB and 20 dB, respectively have been reported. Simulation also shows that the power penalty improvement is approximately 2.5 dB for bit error rate of 10-9 for subcarrier at 10 and 35 GHz and relative intensity noise is suppressed by 3 dB.