Simple 14-Gb/s Short-Range Radio-Over-Fiber System Employing a Single-Electrode MZM for 60-GHz Wireless Applications

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of a simple multigigabit-per-second (Gbps) radio-over-fiber (RoF) system employing multilevel orthogonal frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) signal modulation at 60 GHz and a single-electrode Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM). In this paper, the impact of fiber chromatic dispersion and OFDM beat noise on the performance of the RoF system are investigated by theoretical analysis, VPI WDM-TransmissionMaker simulation and experimental demonstration. A 13.875-Gb/s QPSK OFDM signal occupying the full 7-GHz license-free band at 60 GHz with frequency multiplication for the RoF link is demonstrated. After 3 km of standard single-mode fiber transmission with no dispersion compensation, the power penalty is less than 3 dB.