Design of flexible photonics-based RF transmitter and receiver for future mobile networks

The design of flexible photonics-based wireless transmitter and receiver is presented. The schemes exploit the RF up- and down-conversion realized by modulating a mode-locked laser (MLL), to manage wireless signals up to the millimeter waveband (MMB). The accurate choice of the repetition rate of the MLL allows the full operability in all the unlicensed spectral range from 57.24GHz to 65.88GHz which will be covered by future wireless systems. The designed architectures also ensure a frequency flexibility which allows to reconfigure the wireless transmitter and receiver to manage RF signals on several frequency ranges, from MMB down to base-band. This flexibility and the design based on optical and RF commercial devices, makes the proposed architectures a cost-effective and prompt solution for the future mobile networks, where signals with multiple protocols and on multiple frequency bands will be exploited to fulfill the increasing demand for mobile data exchange.