Heterodyne Optical Carrier Suppression for Millimeter-Wave-over-Fiber Systems

Optical carrier suppression (OCS) has been considered one of the most promising modulation schemes used in radio-over-fiber femto-cell systems to generate millimeter-wave (mmwave) in V-band (60 GHz) or E-band (71 to 93 GHz) for its low bandwidth requirement, simplicity, robustness, and optical-to-radio conversion efficiency. A novel mmwave generation scheme based on a superheterodyne OCS structure is introduced to overcome the limitations of the conventional homodyne OCS scheme, including vector-signaling, uplink optical-millimeter conversion, and inter-radio-frequency band interferences. The transmission performance and characteristics of conventional and newly-introduced mmwave generation schemes are investigated thoroughly in this research to fulfill the requirements of various applications.