An intensity modulation and coherent balanced detection intersatellite microwave photonic link using polarization direction control

• The IMD3 is suppressed without causing any IMD2 or HD2 components.
• The noise power is reduced by linear polarization control.
• The coherent detection is realized without a LO in the receiver.
• The SNDR is higher than an IMDD link.

A simple approach for high loss intersatellite microwave photonic link with intensity modulation and coherent balanced detection is proposed. In the transmitter, the double sideband-suppressed carrier (DSB-SC) modulated optical signal and optical carrier (OC) are combined by employing a polarization combiner to chose and control the signals polarization directions, while in the receiver, they are selected respectively by using a polarization splitter for they have orthogonal polarization directions. The separated DSB-SC signal and OC put into balanced detectors and the coherent detection is realized without a local oscillator (LO). At the output, the fundamental signal is augmented and the third-order distortion is suppressed for the DSB-SC modulation, the second-order distortion is removed for the balanced detection and the noise is reduced for the polarization direction control. The signal to noise and distortion ratio (SNDR) can be optimized by adjusting the power of OC and modulation index. The simulation results show that, a SNDR higher than 30 dB can be obtained for the proposed method, which is in agreement with the theoretical analysis.