Design of Millimeter-Wave based Radio over Fiber for 5G Applications

As technology develops and data demands get higher, 5G technology increases capacity, improves connectivity, and is more flexible with user mobility. The Radio over Fiber (RoF) technique on millimeter-wave is an attractive solution to provide high data rates and network capacity. This study conducted a design and simulation of a millimeter wave-based RoF system with a radio frequency of 64 GHz. A phase modulator is an external modulation technique to generate millimeter-wave signals. The considered parameters are the Bit Error Rate (BER), Q Factor, and Eye Diagram parameters for system analysis by varying optical cable lengths of 1 km, 3 km, and 5 km. By varying the length of the optical fiber, the system performance does not meet the recommended parameters for an optical fiber length of5 km, where the resulting minimum value of BER is greater than $10^{-9}$. This result shows that long transmission should consider dispersion factors for a millimeter wave-based RoF for 5G applications.