Open AccessBroadband IF-Over-Fiber Transmission With Parallel IM/PM Transmitter Overcoming Dispersion-Induced RF Power Fading for High-Capacity Mobile Fronthaul Links
Author(s) -
Shota Ishimura,
Byung Gon Kim,
Kazuki Tanaka,
Kosuke Nishimura,
Hoon Kim,
Yun C. Chung,
Masatoshi Suzuki
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
ieee photonics journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.725
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1943-0655
pISSN - 1943-0647
DOI - 10.1109/jphot.2017.2787722
Subject(s) - engineered materials, dielectrics and plasmas , photonics and electrooptics
We demonstrate a broadband and long-distance intermediate frequency-over-fiber (IFoF) transmission scheme employing a transmitter composed of parallel intensity/phase (IM/PM) modulators with appropriate bandwidth allocations to IM and PM. Due to the proposed scheme, we can eliminate all the null frequencies caused by dispersion-induced RF power fading, which, in turn, enables us to significantly increase the available bandwidth. In addition, our system does not require any synchronization between IM and PM, which reduces complexity compared to conventional parallel transmitter architecture. We successfully transmitted 20 × 360 MHz filtered orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexed signals corresponding to a common public radio interface equivalent data rate of 524.28 Gbps over a 30- and 40-km single-mode fiber satisfying the 8% threshold for the error-vector magnitude values for all the subcarriers. These results show that our proposed IFoF transmission scheme is scalable to long-distance mobile fronthaul links for 5G and beyond.