Photonic filterless scheme to generate V-band OFDM vector mm-wave signal without precoding

Abstract

A novel and relatively simple scheme for the generation of high-quality V-band (50–75 GHz) OFDM vector millimeter-wave (mm-wave) is presented, which is only enabled by a dual-parallel Mach–Zehnder modulator (DP-MZM). In this scheme, precoding technique and optical filter are not needed. At the transmitter, electrical dual single sideband (SSB) signals are generated by a digital signal processing (DSP) module, in which the frequency of modulated signals could be adjusted flexibly. The two push–pull sub-MZMs are biased at quadrature transmission points to generate dual optical single sideband (OSSB) signals. The DP-MZM is biased at null transmission point to suppress the center optical carrier and an asymmetrical OSSB signal can be obtained. Then, a higher frequency OFDM vector mm-wave signal is generated after the beating of the asymmetrical OSSB signal at the photodiode. Theoretical analysis is given out in the paper, and V-band OFDM vector mm-wave at the frequency of 65 GHz is generated in the simulation. The results show that the bit-error ratio (BER) of the transmission system is smaller than forward-error correction (FEC) threshold of 3.8×10−3, when the optical power into photodiode (PD) of 10/20/30 Gbaud cases are not less than −19.13 dB, −17.81 dB, −16.50 dB respectively after 50km single model fiber transmission.