An All-photonic Digital Radio over Fiber architecture

Abstract

Radio over Fiber (RoF) technology uses optical fiber links to distribute RF signals from a central station to multiple remote access units due to its ability to provide simple antenna front ends, increased capacity, and multi radio wireless access coverage. In this paper, an All-photonic Digital Radio over Fiber (DRoF) architecture is proposed and its performance is individually investigated in a dedicated and an integrated fiber link and compared with an Analog Radio over Fiber (ARoF) and Baseband over Fiber communication systems. Link's performance is investigated in the presence of other channels interference and Mode-locked Laser Diode pulse trains with about overall 1 picoseconds timing jitter. Simulation results proved that the proposed All-Photonic DROF is a suitable candidate for very high sampling rate of the digital optical links and is more robust against channel interferences than Analog Radio over Fiber (ARoF).