Flexible Multiband Signal Transmission using a Directly Modulated Laser over Photonically Generated 40 GHz

Flexible multiband signal transmission is proposed and demonstrated over photonically generated millimeter wave signal at 40 GHz. The proposed scheme is based on a low cost directly modulated laser (DML) for data transmission and a Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) for carrier suppressed double sideband modulation as the optical frequency multiplication scheme employed for millimeter wave signal generation. Multiple bands transmission with 50 MHz 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) have been experimentally demonstrated along 10 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) link with a total bitrate of 1.2 Gb/s under a minimum RoP of -1.1 dBm. Further experiments with each band employing different modulation formats and bandwidths show successful performance up to 200 Mb/s using quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), 16-QAM, 64-QAM bands, as a proof of concept towards flexible deployment of future networks, i.e. employing centralized radio access network (C-RAN) architecture.