Full-duplex fiber-wireless link with 40 Gbit/s 16-QAM signals for alternative wired and wireless accesses based on homodyne/heterodyne coherent detection

• A full-duplex fiber-wireless link for wired and wireless alternative accesses is proposed.
• User terminals can choose the way to receive the downlink signal alternatively based on the homo/heterodyne detection.
• A tunable laser is used to provide the optical local oscillator and the uplink optical carrier at the HONU.

A novel full-duplex fiber-wireless link with 40 Gbit/s 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals is proposed to provide alternative wired and wireless accesses for the user terminals. In the central station (CS), the downstream signal for wired and wireless accesses is beared onto the CW laser source via an optical I/Q modulator to realize the QAM modulation. At the hybrid optical network unit (HONU), a tunable laser is used to provide coherent optical local oscillator for homo-/heterodyne beating to coherently down-convert the baseband optical signal to the baseband electrical one for wired access or to the mm-wave one for wireless access according to the requirement of the user terminals. Simultaneously, the lightwave from the tunable laser is also used as the uplink optical carrier for either wired or wireless access, and is modulated colorlessly by the baseband or mm-wave signal of the uplink alternatively. After filtering, only one tone carrying the uplink signal is transmitted back to the CS even for the wireless access. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that our proposed full-duplex link for the alternative wired and wireless accesses maintains good performance even when the transmission link with standard single mode fiber (SSMF) is extended to 30 km.