Simple 14-Gb/s Short-Range Radio-Over-Fiber System Employing a Single-Electrode MZM for 60-GHz Wireless Applications

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of a simple multigigabit-per-second (Gbps) radio-over-fiber (RoF) system employing multilevel orthogonal frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) signal modulation at 60 GHz and a single-electrode Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM). In this paper, the impact of fiber chromatic dispersion and OFDM beat noise on the performance of the RoF system are investigated by theoretical analysis, VPI WDM-TransmissionMaker simulation and experimental demonstration. A 13.875-Gb/s QPSK OFDM signal occupying the full 7-GHz license-free band at 60 GHz with frequency multiplication for the RoF link is demonstrated. After 3 km of standard single-mode fiber transmission with no dispersion compensation, the power penalty is less than 3 dB.