Generation of radio signals using a novel Mach-Zehnder modulator with four arms

We have proposed and demonstrated a novel Mach-Zehnder modulation technique which employs a 1 × 4 multimode interference MMI coupler and four optical phase-modulator waveguides to generate optical single sideband (SSB) signals in radio-over-fiber (ROF) transmission link. It is shown that when the RF (radio frequency) modulation index is large, the optical SSB signal generated by conventional modulation scheme contains a significant part of undesired higher order harmonics, accordingly, much distortion in the RF signal was detected at the base station (BS). However, the main undesired higher order harmonics can be suppressed using our proposed modulation scheme and the performance of the transmission links were largely improved in single-channel and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) cases.