Theoretical and Experimental Demonstration of OFM Robustness Against Modal Dispersion Impairments in Radio Over Multimode Fiber Links

A theoretical signal analysis is presented to demonstrate the robustness of optical frequency multiplication (OFM) against modal dispersion impairments in radio-over-multimode fiber links. The predicted system robustness is also experimentally demonstrated with the generation and transmission of 60 Mb/s and 120 Mb/s 64-QAM radio-frequency signals at 24 GHz over three different 4.4-km-long multimode fiber links with different modal group delays and frequency response characteristics, yielding error vector magnitude values below 4% and 4.8% (for 60 and 120 Mb/s, respectively).