A Radio-Over-Fiber System with a Novel Scheme for Optical Local Oscillator and mm-Wave Distribution

This study proposes a novel scheme for realizing a cost-effective Base Station (BS) by using optical Local Oscillator (LO) and millimeter (mm)-wave signal distribution in a Radio-Over-Fiber (ROF) system. In the Central Station (CS), the optical LO and mm-wave signals were obtained via the Four-Wave Mixing (FWM) process in a Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA). A 100/200 GHz optical interleaver was used to separate the optical LO and mm-wave signal in the BS and simplify the complexity of the filtering configuration. The 40 GHz optical LO and mm-wave distribution has been experimentally demonstrated in ROF systems by using the proposed scheme. The power penalty for downlink 40 GHz mm-wave signal was less than 1 dB.