W-band radio-over-fiber transmission system with delta-sigma modulation and direct detection

Abstract

We experimentally built a W-band photonics-aided millimeter-wave radio-over-fiber transmission system and demonstrated the delivery of up to 8192-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signal. Discrete multitone signals are converted into 1-bit data streams through delta-sigma modulation and then modulated onto a 76.2 GHz carrier. An envelope detector is used at the receiver side for direct detection. The results prove that our proposed system can support 2048QAM and 8192QAM transmission while meeting the hard decision forward error correction threshold of 3.8×10-3 and the soft decision forward error correction threshold of 4.2×10-2, respectively. We believe this cost-effective scheme is a promising candidate for future high-order QAM millimeter-wave downlink transmission.