Millimeter-wave signal generation and its radio-over-fiber link transmission based on optical SSB modulation in 105-GHz band

The development of a system facilitating the convergence of millimeter-wave and optical systems is highly desirable to realize 5G/beyond 5G mobile communication. However, such broad-bandwidth signals cannot be easily transmitted using a long optical fiber owing to the optical fiber chromatic dispersion effect. This paper reports upon the realization of a high-speed millimeter-wave radio-over-fiber signal transmission by using an optical single-sideband (SSB) modulation scheme. The combination of an optical intensity modulator and optical filter can provide the optical SSB signals with an automatic bias controller. The IEEE802.11ad-compliant packet streams are successfully transmitted and converted into 105 GHz millimeter-wave signals. The system can generate and transmit a packet in 16-QAM under an error vector magnitude of 4.8% at a frequency of 104.77 GHz.