Bidirectional single sideband transmission of Millimeter Waves over Fiber for 5G Mobile Networks

This study proposes, experimentally demonstrates, and simulates a network architecture for the transport of millimeter waves (MMW) based on Radio over Fiber (RoF) techniques for the transport of signals in the fronthaul segment of the next 5G generation mobile systems. Such approach exploits the benefits of bidirectional single-sideband modulation in order to generate an optical subcarrier for the downlink transmission and a second subcarrier for the transport of the uplink services, as well as the centralization of optical sources. The proposed architecture is evaluated based on the analyses of the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance and Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) in both downlink and uplink. Likewise, simulation modeling of the approach was conducted in order to evaluate the quality of the MMW signals at different frequencies available in the MMW spectrum. The results show a power penalty lower than 2 dB for a 1x1-12 BER and an EVM below 12% within a power margin of 6 dB, which demonstrates the feasibility of the approach.