A Hammerstein-type equalizer for concatenated fiber-wireless uplink

In optical fiber-based wireless access schemes, the radio signal is transmitted through fiber without frequency conversion radio-over-fiber (ROF). Although the fiber has adequate bandwidth, nonlinear distortion due to electrical to optical (E/O) conversion is a concern. In the uplink, the dynamic multipath wireless channel is followed by this static memoryless ROF link; this forms a Wiener system. In this paper, we propose a Hammerstein type decision feedback equalizer (HDFE) for the fiber-wireless uplink to combat the nonlinear distortion and the wireless channel dispersion. The proposed equalizer is less complex because it handles static and dynamic distortions separately. The nonlinear distortion is compensated first, reducing the power of cross modulation products significantly. Analytical results show that the lower bound of the mean squared error depends on the optical and wireless channel noise. The bit error rate (BER) performance of the HDFE for the nonlinear channel approaches the performance of a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) in a linear channel when the nonlinearity is adequately compensated.