Demonstration of a Wideband 28 GHz Analog Radio-over-Fiber Optical Fronthaul Transmission Enabling Nonlinearity Tolerance

A 1 GHz wideband analog radio-over-fiber link at the RF carrier frequency of 28 GHz is demonstrated over a 10 kilometer fiber transmission using 64-Quadrature amplitude modulation (64-QAM), with the nonlinearity analysis indicating that the link performance is limited by the frontend analog RF components at the transmitter. Such nonlinearity can be improved by a low-complexity modified cut-and-paste probabilistic shaping (M-CAP-PS) approach. M-CAP-PS-based 64-QAM is also demonstrated to improve the system bit-errorrate performance with a data rate of 5.54 Gb/s.