Full-duplex radio-over-fiber system with photonics frequency quadruples for optical millimeter-wave generation

We have experimentally investigated two different schemes (schemes A and B) to generate optical millimeter-wave using optical frequency quadrupling with a Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM), and wavelength reuse for uplink connection in the radio-over-fiber (ROF) systems. For scheme A, only one MZM is used for both the optical millimeter-wave generation and signal modulation. For scheme B, two MZMs are used. In this scheme, one of MZMs is used to generate optical millimeter-wave for frequency quadrupling, and another one is used for signal modulation. In both schemes, at the base station (BS), the optical carrier can be reused to carry upstream data and delivered to the central station (CS). By experimentally comparing the performance of downstream and upstream transmission in two schemes, it can be seen that scheme B can overcome the crosstalk between the upstream and downstream signals, but scheme A cannot. Meanwhile we also show that the millimeter-wave generated in scheme B has better quality and is almost robust to fiber chromatic dispersion.