Full-Duplex 60-GHz RoF System With Optical Local Oscillating Carrier Distribution Scheme Based on FWM Effect in SOA

A full-duplex 60-GHz radio-over-fiber (RoF) system using novel optical local oscillating (LO) carrier distribution scheme to reduce the system cost and realize centralized management is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. In the proposed scheme, the optical LO carriers for producing remote electrical LO signals at the base stations (BSs) are generated together with the downlink RoF carriers at the central station (CS) via four-wave-mixing effect in semiconductor optical amplifier, and are then distributed to the BSs along with the downlink RoF signals. By down-converting the 60-GHz-band uplink signal with the remotely produced 60-GHz LO signal and reusing the optical LO carriers as the uplink optical source, only a cost-effective intermediate frequency modulator is required at each BS to transmit the uplink signal, which will dramatically reduce the whole system budget due to a large amount of BSs. Moreover, the operating frequency of each BS can be controlled remotely at the CS end to realize centralized management and convenient reconfiguration. Using the proposed scheme, 622-Mb/s signals for both directions are successfully transmitted over a 20-km single-mode fiber link and a 50-cm wireless channel with less than 0.1- and 0.2-dB power penalty for downlink and uplink, respectively.