Nonlinear Effects of Radio over Fiber Transmission in Base Station Cooperation Systems

In this paper we consider the uplink of Base Station (BS cooperation) systems, where each Mobile Terminal (MT) employs a Single-Carrier with Frequency-Domain Equalization (SC-FDE) modulation scheme. The combined signals at each BS are detected and/or separated by a Central Processing Unit (CPU) with Iterative Block Decision Feedback Equalization (IB-DFE) receivers. We consider a Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) link between the BS and the CPU, the electrical and optical conversions are performed by a Mach-Zehnder (MZ) modulator, which introduces nonlinear distortion. We design robust receivers that take advantage of the statistical characteristics of the nonlinear distortion.