Experimental demonstration of digitized RF transport over optical fiber links

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate high performance transmission of microwave signals deploying digitized RF transport over a standard optical fiber link. Bandpass sampling technique is used to digitize a 2.475 GHz microwave signal (WiMAX) with a 16 QAM modulation format and 6 MSymbol/s data rate and is transmitted over a 20 km optical link. Using an ADC with 8 bit resolution, a WiMAX signal was successfully transmitted and recovered with very good error-vector magnitudes (~1.77).