Palm-shaped spectrum generation for dual-band millimeter wave and baseband signals over fiber

• A palm-shaped multi-band spectrum generation is proposed for RoF system.
• Both spectrum generation and modulation are done by only one dual-parallel MZM.
• Experimental results verify that the proposed scheme outperforms optical flat comb.
• The proposed scheme works properly under different dual-band MMW configurations.

In order to offer abundant available bandwidth for radio access networks satisfying future 5G requirements on capacity, this paper proposes a simple and cost-effective palm-shaped spectrum generation scheme that can be used for high capacity radio over fiber (RoF) system. The proposed scheme can simultaneously generate an optical carrier used for upstream and two bands of millimeter wave (MMW) that are capable of carrying different downstream data. The experiment results show that the proposed palm-shaped spectrum generation scheme outperforms optical frequency comb (OFC) based multi-band MMW generation in terms of upstream transmission performance. Furthermore, simulation is carried out with different dual-band MMW configurations to verify the feasibility of using the proposed spectrum generation scheme in the RoF system.