40 Gb/s 4-QAM OFDM radio over fiber system at 60 GHz employing coherent detection

Abstract

In this paper, the simulation of 60 GHz millimeter-wave radio over fiber link with 4-QAM OFDM modulation format at 40 Gb/s over 150 km SMF is proposed. The 60 GHz millimeter-wave signal is generated by the optical heterodyne method. Coherent detection has been used at the receiver to down-convert millimeter-wave signal to IF band. Introduction of the OFDM modulation in RoF-based system realizes the benefits of higher order modulations (such as 4-QAM, 16-QAM, etc.) to ensure the good spectral efficiency and multi-gigabit access. The performance of the system is analyzed by Q-factor and BER by which it can be shown that the best results are obtained at the input power of 10 dBm. The simulation results clearly demonstrate the feasibility of this 4-QAM OFDM RoF system over 150 km fiber link.

Keywords:

• radio over fiber
• orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing
• optical heterodyning
• millimeter-wave