Optical Millimeter-Wave Generation and Transmission Without Carrier Suppression for Single- and Multi-Band Wireless Over Fiber Applications

Abstract

A new optical millimeter-wave generation scheme to double the beating frequency without suppressing the carrier by taking advantages of the out-of-phase property between sidebands of a phase-modulated optical carrier is proposed for the first time. Theoretical analysis shows that the generated 60 GHz optical millimeter-wave (mm-wave) can tolerant ±0.016 nm wavelength drifting with filter bandwidth ranging from 70 to 100 GHz to sustain first to second harmonic suppression ratio of 18 dB. The doubled frequency is continuously tunable from 60 to 90 GHz within 100 GHz filter bandwidth with RF power variation of less than 2 dB. In addition, simultaneously generating and transmitting multi-band signal: millimeter-wave band, microwave band, and baseband leveraging the same concept is also proposed. Error-free transmission of 2.5 Gb/s wireless baseband signals carried by the generated 60 GHz mm-wave is successfully demonstrated in both single- and multi-band network environments over a combined optical fiber and wireless distance with a proper equivalent isotropically radiated power of about 20 dBm for in-building access. Moreover, dispersion effect on the generated frequency-doubled optical mm-wave is analyzed by experimentally comparing the link performance of both single mode fiber (SMF-28) and dispersion-shifted fiber cases. It is concluded that for single-band service delivery, the proposed scheme is immune to the interference from the dispersion-induced, redundant 1st harmonics; however, to deliver multi-band services, launching lightwave at zero-dispersion wavelength over SMF-28 is highly recommended to mitigate inter-band interference.