Experimental Demonstration of Hybrid Photonics-BasedARoF System for 5G and B5G Networks

Fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G (B5G) mobile communications may offer customers low latency and high data rate services by utilising fiber optical transmission networks. In this paper, we experimentally develop a hybrid analog radio-over-fiber (ARoF) system and investigate its performance over Ka-band for wireless millimeter wave (mm-wave) transmission. Several Ka-band frequencies which are considered for 5G in Europe, China, the US, Japan, etc. are addressed in this research to evaluate the performance and improvability of the hybrid ARoF mm-wave transmission system. We use channel pre-equalisation for transmission quality improvements, where optical nonlinearities and distortions introduced by electrical components are compensated, leading to significant BER improvement of the received signal.