Distortion of OFDM Signals on Radio-Over-Fiber Links Integrated With an RF Amplifier and Active/Passive Electroabsorption Modulators

The integration of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and radio-over-fiber (RoF) techniques have made cost-effective and high-data-rate mobile wireless Internet networks possible, such as wireless broadband networks. This paper describes the distortion effects of OFDM signals fed via an RF amplifier integrated with an RoF link employing active and passive electroabsorption modulators (EAM) for chiefly broadband in-building network applications. First, peak-to-average power ratio was investigated for RoF links. Second, the adjacent channel power ratio, which estimates the degree of spectral re- growth due to the in-band and out-of-band interference resulting from distortion effects from nonlinear amplification, error vector magnitude, and system distortion effects, was also observed for the proposed system. In this study, we considered a combined Volterra-series and impulse response-based analytical model for WiBro systems and compared it to the observed measurements. We analyzed the different nonlinear distortion effects for OFDM signals driven via an RF amplifier that was integrated with an RoF link employing a distributed feedback laser as a transmitter and an active and passive InP EAM as a receiver. The results show significant agreement between the suggested analytical model and the measurement case. This study is unique in that it examines the distortion effects of RoF links with active and passive EAMs as an access point for OFDM-based wireless access networks.