Experimental Demonstration of the Effect of Frequency Mapping on Performance in an SOA-Based C-RAN Architecture Based on the AIFoF Technology for 5G Communications

In order to mitigate second-order intermodulation distortion products, induced by the interaction between the Mach-Zehnder modulator, the photodiode and the semiconductor optical amplifier in an optical fronthaul fifth generation architecture, an optimized intermediate frequency configuration has been proposed and analytically investigated. It has been experimentally validated through the transmission of three orthogonal frequency division multiplexing bands of 200 MHz through 18.3 km of single-mode fiber, using the analog intermediate frequency signal over fiber technology. Results show the optimized intermediate frequency configuration leads to an error vector magnitude improvement for the 4 and 16-QAM cases.