Simulative investigation of the impact of EDFA and SOA over BER of a single-tone RoF system

In this paper, we investigate the impact of EDFA and SOA amplifiers over BER and Q-parameter of a Radio-over-Fiber (Rof) system consisting of two different system set-ups using direct- and external-laser modulation techniques. In this work, we also measured and compared the electric Rf power at receiver at different modulating Rf frequencies up to 20 GHz using two different optical amplifiers, i.e. EDFA and SOA. Further, we also compared the received electric Rf power at different optical powers without and with different optical amplifiers. An improvement of −11 dB (approx.) of received Rf power was observed using EDFA with the external modulation technique, on comparing with direct modulation.