Experimental analysis of EVM and BER for indoor radio-over-fibre networks using polymer optical fibre

Abstract

This paper presents a theoretical investigation and experimental implementation of indoor radio-over-fibre (RoF) using polymer optical fibre. We characterise the system based on the error vector magnitude (EVM), bit error rate (BER), and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We consider three modulation formats of quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and 64-QAM. The results show the effect of modulation order on the higher acceptable EVM limit that can be linked with the BER estimation process. Furthermore, the analysis of input signal power penalty for the three modulations indicates the advantage of higher order formats. We conclude that even with linear increment of the power penalty, higher orders modulation can offer a higher bandwidth without a significant difference compared to lower orders.