Optically steerable antenna array for radio over fibre transmission

A simple design to upgrade radio over fibre (RoF) reception with smart antennas is presented. The smart antenna steers the radiation beam by optically setting the amplitudes and phases of the array elements. Phase shifts are obtained with the same standard singlemode optical fibre used for RoF transmission. All signals from the receiving antennas are transmitted over the same fibre at different wavelengths, using electrically driven DFB lasers with on-chip MZ modulators. In this way it is possible to compute the vector sum of the received signals and perform the maximum-directivity beam-former algorithm.