High Capacity Mobile Fronthaul Using DP-MZM-Based IF-Over-Fiber System with 1-Tbit/s CPRI-Equivalent Data Rate

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce and demonstrate a high capacity intermediate frequency-over-fiber (IFoF) transmission system using integrated dual parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator (DP-MZM) for mobile fronthaul (MFH) applications. By using an optimized assignment of the multi-IF channels used to drive the DP-MZM and simple IF channels power weighting pre-emphasize in optical domain, the chromatic dispersion-induced RF power fading can be easily overcome. Each IF channel consists of 1.2-GHz orthogonal frequency-division-multiplexed (OFDM) signals, with 1000 subcarriers with 64 QAM-modulated symbols and 200 subcarriers with QPSK modulated pilots. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of our proposed system for different number of IF channels and data rates. Using our proposed system, we successfully transmitted (14 × 1.2-GHz) multi-IFoF signal with 1.032 Tbit/s CPRI-equivalent data rate over a 20-km single mode fiber. The obtained results demonstrate the potentials of DP-MZM based IFoF systems to provide massive data transfer for MFH.