Optical millimeter wave generation for cellular mobile systems

An optical millimeter wave generation approach is presented for cellular mobile systems. The well-known methods distribute the millimeter wave signal via fibers. They have drawbacks because they need very high speed photonic components which are expensive. That problem is overcome by the present approach utilizing an optically transmitted low-frequency reference signal to generate the millimeter wave carrier. This approach applies inexpensive photonic components and is less sensitive to the fiber dispersion.