Impact of the receiver and transmitter bandwidth on the performance of high-speed OFDM signal in Radio-over-Fiber Communication Systems

Addressing the excessive decrease of demands on radio-over-fiber (RoF) technologies, the paper aims to investigate the properties of the orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexed (OFDM) signal transmitted in the radio-over-fiber communication system. Particularly, we evaluate the impact of the receiver and transmitter bandwidth on the performance of the 5 Gbaud 32-quadrature-amplitude-modulated (QAM) OFDM) signal transmitted by RoF transmission system integrated into the passive optical network (PON). The performance is evaluated in terms of symbol-error-rate (SER) and error-vector-magnitude (EVM). As a result, we prove, that the impact of bandwidth decreases with the increase of the number of subcarriers (about 6 powers of SER or 0.7% of EVM), while the difference between the impact of RX and TX bandwidth on the contrary - increases demonstrating the dominance of TX bandwidth with the maximal SER difference of 6 powers of SER (corresponding to 2.5 difference in terms of EVM). We also provide the evaluation of the impact of the increase of the bandwidth from 10 to 20 GHz as well as the impact of received optical signal power for 10G receiver for different QAM orders.