Architectures for Multiband Multi Gbps Radio-over-Fiber Systems

An overview over all elements of a Radio over Fiber (RoF) system is provided including optical transmitter, fiber optic link, wireless link and millimeter wave receiver. The influence of the wireless link on the data capacity of the RoF link is analyzed using Shannon's theoretical limit. To include the influence of the fiber optic link the consequences of chromatic dispersion and PMD for the link budget are discussed for different modulation schemes. On that basis different system approaches for the optical transmitter for Multi Gbps communications are presented and evaluated including a concept for multiband-millimeter-wave generation based on an optical frequency comb. The multiband concept will be presented and evaluated in comparison to the alternative approaches on a system level. Together with the demonstration of two different receiver concepts the paper offers a comprehensive guideline for the design of Radio over Fiber systems for the convergence of wireless and fiber optic broadband user access.