Adaptive Reed–Solomon coding and envelope detection of photonic vector signal in V-band radio over fiber system

In this paper, a millimeter-wave radio-over-fiber (RoF) system based on adaptive Reed–Solomon (RS) coding scheme and envelope-detector-based (ED-based) down-conversion for 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) vector signal are proposed and experimentally investigated, which makes the ROF systems simpler, lower-cost and more robust to the phase noise of the generated millimeter-wave signals compared with the conventional system. The transmission of RS-coded 16-QAM vector signals with the bit rate of 2-Gb/s and 4-Gb/s at 60-GHz over 20-km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) and 2-m wireless distance are successfully achieved. RS coding module is adaptively performed via the last received codeword error rate (CER) estimated by the output of the first RS encoder. The experimental results show that the post-FEC bit error rate (BER) of 1×10 ⁻⁸ can be obtained by adaptive RS coding scheme with the flexible and optimum code rate and redundancies.