Photonic-aided pre-coding QAM signal transmission in multi-antenna radio over fiber system

Abstract A novel method has been proposed and experimentally demonstrated to provide photonic-aided pre-coding quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signal transmission in multi-antenna radio over fiber system to increase the throughput. For downlink, two different multi-level amplitude-shift-keying (M-ASK) modulated signals, such as 4-ASK signals, are applied on two uncorrelated optical Mach-Zehnder modulators at central office. After photonic-aided pre-coding module and photo-detection process, the received M-ASK mm-waves from two remote access units (RAUs) can be synthesized to a M²-QAM signal in the proposed system. Regardless of forward error correction (FEC) coding overhead, the 4-Gb/s and 8-Gb/s 16-QAM mm-wave signals are obtained from two independent 2-Gb/s and 4-Gb/s 4-ASK 40-GHz channels, respectively. The experimental results show that a doubled bit rate of the original 4-ASK one can be achieved without additional digital signal processing (DSP) in small cell RAUs and mobile users.