Experimental evaluation of the transmission in a low cost SCM/WDM radio over fibre system employing optical broadband sources and interferometric structures

In this paper, a novel transmission configuration for SCM/WDM radio over fibre communication systems is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The scheme is based on the spectrum slicing of a low-cost optical broadband source to obtain a set of optical channels compatible with WDM technology. In order to increase the frequency operation range limited to hundreds of MHz due to the fibre dispersion effects over the optical broadband source, a Mach-Zehnder Interferometric structure is introduced to extend the operative frequency range up to 20 GHz. In this context, the quality of service of different digital signals such as BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM and 32-QAM is experimentally evaluated. The experimental measurements show EVM performances below 6% for each WDM channel in a standard singlemode fibre link making the architecture suitable for last mile broadband applications in Passive Optical Networks.