Remote mmW photonic local oscillator delivery for uplink down-conversion in DML-based optical hybrid C-RAN fronthaul

In this work, we propose and demonstrate the remote delivery of a photonically generated local oscillator (LO) signal for uplink down-conversion in photonically generated millimeter-wave (mmW) signals over duplex centralized radio access network fronthaul. The technique, based on carrier-suppressed external modulation in a single Mach–Zehnder modulator, is employed for generating the mmW signals, which are distributed over hybrid optical links composed of fiber and free-space optics (FSO) prior to the radio wireless link at 42 GHz, and also for the uplink (UL) LO generation enabling the 38 GHz UL signal down-conversion. A 5G new radio (NR) quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) and 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signal transmission is successfully demonstrated using low-frequency directly modulated lasers for both the downlink and the UL mmW transmission, and thus a low-cost and simple intermediate frequency over fiber and FSO UL deployment are presented. The lowest achieved error vector magnitudes with the 5G NR signals at 100 MHz bandwidth in the proposed mmW UL schemes, including 10 km of optical fiber and a 1.1 m long FSO link, are 5.8% and 6% for QPSK and 64-QAM, respectively.