Optical Front-end Receiver Design for Radio over Fiber System

Mobile communication system faces serious challenges serve high quality broadband service in any situation even in highly dense populated area and high mobility users. Radio over fiber (RoF) technology is proposed as a solution for reducing cost and providing highly reliable communication services. The RoF system is very cost-effective because the localization of signal processing in central station and also use a simple base station. In this paper, two methods of RoF system are investigated for transmitting the radio signal over the optical links with intensity modulation. There are RF signal or IF signal transmission over optical fiber. This paper focus on the RoF optical front-end receiver configuration especially optical heterodyne employing an optoelectronic mixer. Thorough review and comparison of previous works, the HBT is the best performance as an optoelectronic mixer and frequency conversion to millimeter wave.