A Radio-Over-Fiber System With Frequency 12-Tupling Optical Millimeter-Wave Generation to Overcome Chromatic Dispersion

A radio-over-fiber system with frequency 12-tupling optical millimeter-wave (mm-wave) generation using an integrated nested Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) is proposed and demonstrated by simulation. Through properly adjusting the direct current bias voltages of two sub-MZMs, the RF local oscillator (LO) voltages and phases, and the gain of base-band signal, the frequency 12-tupling optical mm-wave with data only carried by one sixth-order sideband is generated. As the signal is transmitted along the fiber, there is no periodical fading and bit walk-off effect caused by chromatic dispersion. The eye diagrams stay open even when the signal is transmitted over 60 km and the power penalty is 0.67 dB at a BER of 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-10</sup> . Furthermore, it is also proved to be valid that the BER is insensitive to the deviation of modulator extinction ratio and RF LO voltage.