Demonstration of the Transportation of a Microwave Environment Over an Optical IP Network

The concept of the transportation of a microwave environment-a technology that can transport microwaves over an IP network- is discussed. The several possible applications facilitated by this concept are also discussed. A pair of UHF-band microwave/Internet protocol (IP) conversion network interfaces are prototyped, and a unidirectional transport of an integrated service of digital broadcasting-terrestrial (ISDB-T) signal is demonstrated. It is shown that the ISDB-T signal can be transported over an IP network maintaining the bit error rate quality of 10^-5 even when the microwave is sampled by the 6-bit ADC device with an operation rate lower than twice the transported frequency. However, the demonstration shows the IP transportation requires additional carrier-to-noise power ratio margin for the microwave before the IP transportation because of the flat-top sampling process with limited analog input/output bandwidth of ADC/DAC devices. This paper also suggests that transporting truncated microwaves intermittently over an IP network and analyzing them centrally are effective for collecting and monitoring microwave conditions at remote multiple places, such as power levels and spectrums, with reduced throughput.