Optical millimeter-wave signal generation and wavelength reuse for upstream connection in radio-over-fiber systems

Abstract

We theoretically and experimentally investigate three different schemes to generate optical millimeter-wave and wavelength reuse for uplink connection in radio-over-fiber (ROF) systems. In these schemes, the optical millimeter waves (mm-waves) are generated via a LiNbO3 Mach-Zehnder modulator with the double-sidebands scheme. Particularly, we experimentally demonstrate what we believe to be a new scheme (scheme III) to genetate optical mm-waves by a multiple double-frequency technique to further reduce the overall cost. We compare the performance of the three different schemes for ROF systems considering the cost and configuration of their architectures.