Development of highly flexible broadband networks incorporating wavelength division multiplexing and sub-carrier division multiplexing in a hybrid radio/fiber distribution system

A radio over fiber distribution system incorporating both SCM and WDM technologies is presented. The SCM signal contains five 155 Mbit/s data channels, centered around 18.5 GHz with 450 MHz spacing. This signal is directly modulated onto three high-speed lasers with emission frequencies spaced by 50 GHz. Bragg filters are employed at the receiver base station in order both to demultiplex the required optical channel, and to ensure that the detected signal is single side band (in order to overcome dispersion limitations on the link). Our results show negligible degradation in system performance for the demultiplexing of the WDM signal compared with the back-to-back performance curves.