Optical CS-DSB Schemes for 5G mmW Fronthaul Seamless Transmission

This paper describes the experimental demonstration of the hybrid optical/millimeter wave signal generation and transmission over combined optical fiber and free space optics fronthaul network with a seamless antenna link. An electrical bandpass filter is used to filter out the spectrum after photodetection in order to realize the seamless antenna transmission. The successful transmission of 64/256-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) 5G signal with up to 200 MHz bandwidth is presented by using two different setups: one is based on two Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) and the other employs a directly modulated laser (DML) to provide more cost efficient fronthaul solution. The DML based approach reveals mildly better performance in comparison to the MZMs in terms of higher achieved signal-to-noise ratio and lower error vector magnitude (EVM). More specifically, the best signal-to-noise ratio and EVM achieved with the DML based setup has been 31.5 dB and 3. 3%, respectively, compared to 30.3 dB and 3.8% with the MZMs based setup while transmitting 256-QAM signal with 100 MHz bandwidth. However, both setups kept the EVM well below the given 9% and 4.5% limit for 64- and 256-QAM, respectively.