Cost-effective and dispersion-tolerant cascade modulation for millimeter-wave-over-fiber applications

In millimeter-wave-over-fiber (MWoF) feeder systems, the received millimeter-wave signals at the remote antennas (RAs) can suffer from signal fading by chromatic dispersion of optical fiber. This can be substantially mitigated by Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) based photonic up-conversion technique. In this technique, the data signals at intermediate frequency (IF) are frequency up-converted to millimeter-wave frequency by an MZM biased at its transmission null point. However, this scheme requires a costly, high-speed MZM, which will hinder the widespread of this technique for cost-sensitive MWoF applications. Hence, we propose and demonstrate a cost-effective way of reducing the cost of MWoF optical transmitters based on photonic up-conversion technique. We employ a dual wavelength source composed of a directly modulated laser and a polarimetric filter. This source is used to generate a millimeter-wave tone signal and to frequency up-convert the IF data signals to millimeter-wave frequency. The dual wavelength source is also shared with numerous RAs for further cost reduction. Our experimental demonstration performed with 30 Msymbol/s 16-quadrature amplitude modulation signals shows that we can transmit the 20 GHz millimeter-wave signals over 25 km standard single-mode fiber without any transmission penalty.