A Comparison of Electrical and Photonic Pulse Generation for IR-UWB on Fiber Links

We present and compare experimental results for electrical and photonic generation of 2-Gb/s pulses for impulse radio ultra-wideband on fiber transmission systems based on direct current modulation of a semiconductor laser diode and external optical injection of a semiconductor laser diode, respectively. We assess the performance of the two generation approaches in terms of bit-error rate after propagation over 20 km of optical fiber followed by wireless transmission.