Investigation of photonic frequency upconversion schemes utilizing FWM in SOAs for RoF applications

Two schemes of photonic frequency upconversion utilizing four-wave mixing in a semiconductor optical amplifier were investigated for radio over fiber applications. Optical radio frequency (RF) signals having a RF frequency of 26.5 GHz are generated by mixing an optical intermediate frequency signal having a frequency of 2.5 GHz with an optical local oscillator signal having a frequency of 24 GHz using two different schemes. The scheme-1 provided lower receiver sensitivity while the scheme-2 showed higher peak power and polarization immunity.