Blind compensation technique for nonlinear distortions in RoF-based mobile fronthaul network by using EML

Abstract We propose a blind compensation technique to mitigate the waveform distortions caused by the nonlinear transfer function of the electro-absorption modulated laser (EML) in the radio-over-fiber (RoF) system. The proposed technique automatically adjusts its coefficients by using the magnitude of the waveform distortions measured at right outside the signal’s bandwidth. By using the proposed technique, we successfully demonstrate the transmission of twelve 198-MHz filtered-orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexed (f-OFDM) signals modulated in 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) format in the RoF–based mobile fronthaul network (MFN) implemented by using EML.