Radio over fiber system carrying OFDM signal based on optical octuple frequency technique

•A scheme of ROF system with octuple optical millimeter-wave generation transmit OFDM signal based on odd order sidebands suppression technique and filtering.•The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme has cost efficient configuration, high spectral efficiency, and good performance for long distance transmission.•The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has cost efficient configuration, high spectral efficiency, and good performance for long distance transmission (up to 50 km).

We have proposed a scheme of radio over fiber (ROF) system with octuple optical millimeter-wave (mm-wave) generation transmit orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal based on odd order sidebands suppression technique and filtering. The transmission performance of the optical mm-wave OFDM signal is theoretically investigated and implemented by numerical simulation. The results show that the time shift induced by chromatic dispersion only causes a slight phase rotation for constellation diagram, and a 40 GHz ROF system with a 2.5 Gbit/s signal remain has a good performance after the signal is transmitted over 50 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF). Then the effects of the Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM) DC-bias and modulation depth (MD) on the system performance are discussed by simulation, and the optimal performance of the system is obtained.