A radio-over-fiber system with photonic generated 16QAM OFDM signals and wavelength reuse for upstream data connection

We have experimentally demonstrated a wavelength reuse scheme for up-link connection in a radio-over-fiber (ROF) system with photonics generated 2.5 Gbit/s 16QAM OFDM signals. In this architecture, 2.5 Gbit/s 16QAM OFDM signals are carried by the optical millimeter-wave (mm-wave) carriers which are generated with four times frequency of the local oscillator (LO) signal. The power penalties for both down- and up-stream signal delivery over 20 km fiber are less than 1 dB.