On the evaluation of an optical OFDM radio over FSO system with IM-DD for high-speed indoor communications

A novel radio over fiber (RoF) and free space optics (FSO) hybrid system based on optical OFDM (OOFDM) signal transmission is proposed in this paper to provide high capacity optical wireless indoor communication links. A low cost transmission scheme based on IM-DD is proposed to simplify and reuse existing infrastructure to deploy a high bandwidth FSO link. This paper shows the experimental results based on the implementation of the proposed scheme under a 16-QAM OOFDM digital transmission over 10 km Single Mode Fiber (SMF) and 300 mm FSO link. The results show the feasibility to deploy a 20 Gbit/s communication system over a 5 GHz RF bandwidth OFDM signal by using IM-DD scheme for the optical transmission without any optical multiplexing technique.