Photonic Generation of Frequency-tripling Vector Signal Based on Balanced Detection without Precoding or Optical Filter

Abstract

A novel approach for frequency-tripling vector signal generation via balanced detection without precoding and optical filter is proposed. The scheme is mainly utilizing an integrated dual-polarization quadrature phase shift keying (DPQPSK) modulator. In the DPQPSK modulator, one QPSK modulator is driven by an RF signal to generate high-order optical sidebands, while the other QPSK modulator is modulated by I/Q data streams to produce baseband vector signal as an optical carrier. After that, a frequency-tripling 16-quadrature-amplitude-modulation (16QAM) vector millimeter-wave (mm-wave) signal can be obtained by balanced detection. The proposed scheme can reduce the complexity of transmitter digital signal processing. The results show that, a 4 Gbaud baseband 16QAM vector signal can be generated at 30 GHz by frequency-tripling. After 10 km single-mode fiber (SMF) transmission, the constellation and eye diagrams of the generated vector signal perform well and a bit-error-rate (BER) below than 1e-3 can be achieved.