Optical Fiber Technology 15 (2009) 222225

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Optical Fiber Technology

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A radio-over-ber system with photonic generated 16QAM OFDM signals and

wavelength reuse for upstream data connection
L. Chen a,b, , J. Lu a,b , J. He a,b , Z. Dong a,b , J. Yu a,b
a
b

Key Laboratory for Micro/Nano Opto-Electronic Devices of Ministry of Education, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China
School of Computer and Communication, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Received 17 July 2008
Revised 19 February 2009
Available online 28 March 2009

We have experimentally demonstrated a wavelength reuse scheme for up-link connection in a radioover-ber (ROF) system with photonics generated 2.5 Gbit/s 16QAM OFDM signals. In this architecture,
2.5 Gbit/s 16QAM OFDM signals are carried by the optical millimeter-wave (mm-wave) carriers which
are generated with four times frequency of the local oscillator (LO) signal. The power penalties for both
down- and up-stream signal delivery over 20 km ber are less than 1 dB.
2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Radio-over-ber
Optical mm-wave
OFDM signal

1. Introduction
The mm-wave bands would be utilized to meet the requirement
for broadband service and overcome the frequency congestion in
the future ROF-based optical-wireless network. In ROF system a
center station (CS) is connected to many functionally simple base
stations (BSs) via optical ber. Almost all processing including
modulation, demodulation, coding, routing are performed at the
CS [14]. The main function of the BS is to realize optical/wireless
conversion and broadcasting by antenna. Novel schemes of wavelength reuse or centralized lightwave in the central oce (CO)
have been proposed and experimentally demonstrated [2,59].
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system can
provide excellent tolerance towards multipath delay spread and
frequency-dependent channel distortion. In recent research, it is
demonstrated that OFDM will become a strong candidate for transmission signals in the next generation long-haul and access networks because of its high spectrum eciency and the resistance
to chromatic dispersion and polarization mode dispersion [1016].
So the combination of OFDM and ROF is naturally suitable for
optical-wireless systems to increase the bandwidth and extend the
transmission distance of mm-wave over both ber and air links.
The generation of low-cost mm-wave for carrying OFDM signal is
one of the key technologies for OFDM-ROF system [1214]. The
optical millimeter generation by frequency quadrupling technique
was proposed in Ref. [9]. Because a low RF oscillator can be used
to generate optical millimeter-wave signal with frequency quadru-

Corresponding author at: School of Computer and Communication, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China.
E-mail address: liliuchen12@vip.163.com (L. Chen).
1068-5200/$ see front matter
doi:10.1016/j.yofte.2009.02.005

2009 Elsevier Inc.

All rights reserved.

pling and sextupling, it has been considered a cost-effective solution. In this paper, we utilized a full-duplex ROF architecture
as shown in Ref. [8] to transmit 2.5 Gbit/s 16QAM OFDM signals on 40 GHz millimeter-wave generated by multiple doublefrequency technique. The constellation diagrams of the received
signal before and after transmission over the ber are obtained.
Both down-stream and upstream signals transmission over 20-km
conventional single-mode ber (SMF-28) have been experimentally
demonstrated.
2. System architecture
Fig. 1 shows the principle of frequency quadrupling and wavelength reuse scheme for up-link connection in OFDM-ROF system.
An intensity modulator (IM) and a cascaded optical lter are employed to generate optical mm-wave and provide the lightwave
source for upstream data modulation. To realize optical mm-wave
carrier with four times of LO frequency, the IM needs to be the
DC-biased at the top peak output power when the LO signal is removed [7]. If the repetitive frequency of the radio-frequency (RF)
microwave source is f, the rst-order modes are suppressed and
the frequency spacing between the second-order modes is equal
to 4f. Then an optical lter is employed to separate the optical carrier from the two second-order sidebands. The OFDM analog data
are carried by the second-order sidebands via another intensity
modulator (IM). Then the modulated mm-wave signals are combined with the optical carrier by using an optical coupler (OC).
After transmission over the ber, the optical mm-wave signals are
separated from the optical carrier by an optical lter. The optical mm-wave signals are detected by a high-speed receiver. In the
base station, the down-converted upstream data are modulated by

L. Chen et al. / Optical Fiber Technology 15 (2009) 222225

223

Fig. 1. Principle diagram of wavelength reuse scheme for up-link connection in mm-wave OFDM-ROF system.

Fig. 2. Experimental setup for OFDM-ROF system. The resolution for optical spectrum insets (i)(iii), (v) is 0.5 nm. The resolution for optical spectrum insets (iv), (vi), (vii) is
025 nm.

another IM before the upstream optical signals are transmitted to

the CS.
3. Experimental setup and results
Fig. 2 shows the experimental setup for OFDM-ROF system. The
lightwave generated by a distributed-feedback laser diode (DFBLD) at 1541.54 nm is modulated by an intensity modulator driven
by a 10 GHz RF microwave signal. The optical spectrum after modulation is inserted in Fig. 2 as inset (i). After modulation, it is
can be seen that the odd-order sidebands are almost suppressed,
and the power of optical carrier is 12 dB larger than that of the
second-order sidebands. The wavelength spaceing between the two

second-order sidebands is 0.32 nm (40 GHz). The fourth-order

sidebands is 20 dB lower than the second-order sidebands. An optical interleavers (IL) with 50/25 GHz channel spacing is employed
to separate the optical carrier and the second-order sidebands. We
used a tunable laser with 2 nm tunable range to enable the correct separation. This interleaver has a 3 dB bandwidth of 0.15 nm,
therefore, the wavelength tolerance of the interleaver cannot be
very large.
The spectrum of the separated carrier is shown in Fig. 2 as inset (ii). Then the optical mm-wave is modulated by the second IM
driven by the 2.5 Gbit/s OFDM baseband signal which are generated oine by Matlab program. The OFDM is baseband signal. The

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L. Chen et al. / Optical Fiber Technology 15 (2009) 222225

Fig. 3. The constellation diagram of the demodulated signal (a) before transmission and (b) after transmission.

Fig. 4. BER curves for (a) upstream and (b) downstream data.

OFDM baseband signals are calculated oine with Matlab program

including mapping 215 1 PRBS into 256 16QAM-encoded subcarriers, subsequently converting the OFDM symbols into time domain
by using IFFT and then adding 32 pilot signal in notch. Guard
interval length is 1/4 OFDM period. 10 training sequences are applied for each 150 OFDM-symbol frame in order to enable phase
noise compensation. The digital waveforms are then downloaded
to an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) to generate 2.5 Gbit/s
electrical OFDM signal waveform. At the output of the AWG lowpass lters (LPF) with 5 GHz bandwidth are used to remove the
high-spectral components. The optical spectrum after modulation
is shown in Fig. 2 as inset (iii). The modulated optical mm-wave
signals are combined with the separated optical carrier by using
a 3-dB OC before they are transmitted over 20-km SMF-28. If we
carefully choose the ber length which connect the OC and interleaver between the two separated signal, the delay between the
two separated signals after the interleaver does not affect the signal performance because the delay is very short. The optical spectrum after OC and EDFA is shown in Fig. 2 as insets (iv) and (v),
respectively. After transmission, the optical mm-wave signals are
separated from the optical carrier by using another IL. The separated optical mm-wave is detected by O/E conversion via a PIN
PD with a 3-dB bandwidth of 60 GHz. The converted electrical

signal is amplied by an electrical amplier (EA) with a bandwidth of 10 GHz centered at 40 GHz. An electrical local oscillator
(LO) signal at 40 GHz is generated by using a frequency multiplier from 10 to 40 GHz. We use the electrical LO signal and a
mixer to down-convert the electrical mm-wave signal to retrieve
the downlink baseband signals, while the separated optical carrier
is re-modulated by a 2.5 Gbit/s upstream signal. The optical spectra from the two ports of the second IL are shown in Fig. 2 as
insets (vi) and (vii). The eye diagram of the upstream data after
transmission over 20 km SMF is shown in Fig. 2 as inset (viii). The
down-converted signals are sampled with a real-time digital oscilloscope. The received data are processed and recovered off-line
with a Matlab program as an OFDM receiver and obtain the BER
performance. Fig. 3 (a) and (b) show the constellation diagram of
the received signal before and after transmission over the ber,
respectively. The effect of ber dispersion can be neglected by using the electrical OFDM signals. Compared with the B-T-B case, the
constellation diagram performance is still good. We measure the
BER performance for both up- and down-stream signals in Fig. 4
(a) and (b), respectively. Fig. 4 shows the up- and down-stream
signal after delivery over 20 km ber has 1 dB and 0.5 dB power
penalty, respectively. It should be pointed out that the BER mea-

L. Chen et al. / Optical Fiber Technology 15 (2009) 222225

surement for OFDM signal is based on off-line processing. For a

practical system, a real-time processing will be needed.
4. Conclusion
We have proposed and experimentally demonstrated a wavelength reuse scheme for up-link connection in a radio-over-ber
(ROF) system with photonics generated 2.5 Gbit/s 16QAM OFDM
signals. The 2.5 Gbit/s electrical OFDM signals is transmitted over
the 40 GHz optical millimeter wave signals which are generated
by using multiple double-frequency techniques. In this scheme, the
repetitive frequency of the RF source and the bandwidth of optical
modulator are largely reduced. The separated high power optical
carrier is re-modulated in the base station; hence the all optical
power can be eciently utilized. The power penalty of downstream signal delivery over 20 km ber is less than 1 dB. The effect
of ber dispersion can be neglected by using the OFDM signals. We
believe that this multiple double-frequency technique to generate
mm-wave signal to carry OFDM signal is a practical scheme for
future broadband ROF network.
Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by the National 863 hightech research and development program of China under Grant
2007AA01Z263, the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation
of China (Grant No. 06JJ50108) and the Open Fund of Key Laboratory of Optical Communication and Lightwave Technologies,
Ministry of Education, PR China (Beijing University of Posts and
Telecommunications).

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Lin Chen was born in 1968. He received the Ph.D. degree in optical communications from the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications,
Beijing, China, in June 2004. He is currently a Professor at Hunan University, Changsha, China. He has authored or coauthored over 40 journal
papers, His current research interests include polarization mode dispersion
compensation, new modulation format techniques, and radio over ber.