IEEE International Conference on Communications 2013: IEEE ICC'13 - Workshop on Optical-Wireless Integrated Technology

for Systems and Networks 2013

Radio-over-Fiber Photonic Wireless Bridge in the WBand

Sebastian Babiel, Andreas Sthr

Atsushi Kanno, Tetsuya Kawanishi

Department of Optoelectronics
University of Duisburg-Essen
Duisburg, Germany

Lightwave Devices Laboratory

National Institute of Information and Communications
Technology
Tokyo, Japan
A disadvantage of the 60-GHz band is that due to the
oxygen absorption peak at 60 GHz, the spectral variation of the
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) will vary strongly over the channel
bandwidth of 7 GHz for wireless spans in excess of a few
hundred meters. Thus, for outdoor wireless point-to-point links
with typical wireless spans in excess of 1 km, it would be
beneficial to operate at higher mm-wave frequencies [7]. The
W-Band (75110 GHz) offers multiple broadband channels for
wireless communication. Depending on national or regional
frequency regulations most common channels are 81-86 GHz,
92-94 GHz and 102-109,5 GHz. These channels have no
drawback of spectrally varying SNR and thus are promising
candidates that open up the possibility of fiber-like
connectivity in the wireless domain [8].

AbstractIn this paper, we present a photonic wireless system

operating in the W-Band (75110 GHz) featuring ultra-high
bandwidth as well as simple NRZ-OOK modulation format. By
using a cascaded optical RF and data modulation approach on
the transmitter side, flexible adjustment of the wireless RF
carrier in the W-Band is achieved, while direct electrical to
optical conversion with advanced photonic components on the
receiver side enables true photonic wireless bridging. In first
experiments, data rates up to 10 Gb/s have been experimentally
demonstrated.
Keywords- Radio-over-Fiber; photonic wireless; w-band;
millimeter-wave; 75-110 GHz; on-off keying; O/E conversion; E/O
conversion

I.

INTRODUCTION

In this paper, we present a solution for a photonic wireless

bridge operating in the W-band suitable for fiber extension or
fiber bridging but also for mobile backhauling in upcoming
wireless networks using broadband standards such as Long
Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced [9].

The interest in resilience of high data rate optical networks

and mobile backhauling connections put an emerging focus on
the direct conversion between optical and wireless networks.
For example the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11,
2011, caused severe damage to the optical fiber network
resulting in a breakdown of almost all broadband connections
[1], [2]. While complete restoration of the optical network
including access networks is expected to require up to two
years, fast recovery of high data rate connections is of utmost
importance for rescue and surveillance and is also desired for
remote surveillance of important facilities as well as for remote
emergency medical services. A possible solution for immediate
deployment of such broadband connections is high-speed radio
communication links. Conventional frequency bands for
mobile and wireless communication (0.510 GHz) do not offer
enough bandwidth required for up-to-date and future mobile
backhauling due to international spectrum regulations. Because
of this, strong efforts were put in extending the carrier
frequency to the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) bands, mainly
for developing systems in the 60-GHz band [35] where
international regulations allow up to a total bandwidth of 7
GHz for license-free wireless usage as an Industrial-ScienceMedical band. Moreover, methods to increase the spectral
efficiency e.g. by using advanced modulation formats such as
quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and adaptive bitloading techniques were successfully applied to mm-wave
wireless systems, increasing data rates up to 41.4 Gb/s [6].

978-1-4673-5753-1/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

II.

PHOTONIC WIRELESS BRIDGE

Key features of the photonic wireless bridge are the

coherent generation of the radio frequency (RF) signal in the
optical domain referred to as coherent photonic mm-wave
generation and the counterpart on the receiver side referred to
as direct electrical to optical conversion, which describes the
conversion of the electrical RF signal into the optical domain
by directly modulating a high bandwidth thin film polymer on
silicon (TFPS) Mach Zehnder modulator (MZM) with this RF
signal. This neglects the use of an electrical mixer and a local
oscillator (LO), which are commonly used for down converting
the RF signal and are potential sources of additional noise. As
both key features are realized by using Mach-Zehnder
interferometer-type optical modulators, at first a brief
theoretical description of these devices and their operating
states is given, followed by a detailed description of the
experimental system setup.
A. Theoretical Description
As explained in [10], a MZM is an intensity modulator
using Mach-Zehnder (MZ) interferometer structures combined

838

with a phase modulation section in one arm of the

interferometer or even in both arms. A phase modulator can be
constructed with an electrode along an optical waveguide on
electrooptic (EO) material. A material having Pockels effect,
which is first order of the EO effect, has a refractive index
dependent on the voltage applied on the material, such as
lithium niobate (LN), lithium tantalite (LT), gallium arsenide
(GaAs), etc. Recently, the EO effect of special thin film
polymers on silicon was discovered and standardized up to data
rates of 100 Gb/s [1115]. By applying electric voltage on the
electrode along the optical waveguide, a change of the
refractive index in the waveguide is achieved, so that the phase
of the lightwave can be controlled. The lightwave is assumed
to be monochromatic for simplicity and can be described by
exp 2if0t. The output lightwave R can be expressed by

f t KV t

where V(t) and K, respectively, denote the electric voltage on

the electrode and the coupling coefficient between the electric
signal and the lightwave signal. ALW is the optical transmittance
in the waveguide. The frequency response of K should be taken
into account, when V(t) has high frequency components. The
coefficient K can be assumed to be a constant if the
wavelengths of the high frequency components on the
electrode are much longer than the length of the electrode. The
response of EO materials or polymer thin films is much faster
than the frequency response of K, which is dominated by that
of the electrode and by the phase mismatch between the
electric and lightwave signals. The voltage for an optical phase
shift of (180) is defined by

Considering that f(t) is a sinusoidal signal described by

ARFsin2fmt, the optical output can be expressed by

R ALW exp i 2f 0t ARF sin 2f mt

LW

J A exp 2i f t nf t

RF

R ALW exp i 2f 0t ARF cos 2f mt

RF

sin 2f mt

i A RF sin 2f mt B
2

1 LW 2if0t
A e
J n A RF e 2i f0t nfmt

2
n

e iB / 2 1 e iB / 2
n

where Jn(A) is the first-kind nth-order Bessel function. ARF is an

index for optical phase deviation induced by the electric signal,
so that it is called induced phase. When f(t) = ARFcos2fmt, the
output is expressed by

J n A RF exp 2i f 0 t nf m t

In the MZ structure the waveguide is equally split into two

arms, having either one phase modulator in one arm or a phase
modulator in both of the arms (push-pull scheme), before being
combined again at the output. As the lightwaves in the two
arms interfere with each other at the output, the resulting output
lightwave is dependent on the phase difference g(t) between
those two lightwaves. When the lightwave in the two arms are
in phase g(t) = 2n, n = -1, 0, +1, the modulator is in
maximum transmission point. Thus, at the junction of the
output, the lightwaves interfere constructively. When the
lightwaves in the two arms are in opposite phase
g(t) = (2n+1), the lightwaves are converted into a higherorder radiation mode waves that cannot propagate through the
waveguide output. Thus, the modulator is in the minimum
transmission point. When g(t) is a sinusoidal signal described
by 2ARFsin2fmt+B, the optical output can be expressed by

i A
R 1 A LW e 2if 0t e

The spectral component of the nth-order sideband, that is

exp 2i(f0t+nfmt), can be expressed by the nth-order Bessel
function. The first-order function J1(A) has the maximum point
at Am = 1.841 where J1(Am) = 0.583. In most applications of
optical modulation techniques as well as in this paper, the
desired component is the first-order sidebands, so that the
induced phase A should be less than Am to achieve effective
modulation without generation of undesired high-order
sideband components.

R ALW e 2if0t if t

A LW

839

A LW e 2if0t cos B
2

i sin

B
2

J A e

RF

2n

J A e

2 n 1

RF

2 i f 0t 2 nfmt

2 i f 0t 2 n 1 f mt

The optical intensity |R| at the output, which can be detected

by a high-speed photodetector, is expressed by

Figure 1. Experimental system setup of the photonic wiress bridge. Optical fiber connections are represented by thin lines, electrical
connections are represented by bold lines.

A LW J 02 A RF cos 2 B 2 J12 A RF sin 2 B

2
2

J A sin

4J 0 A

RF

RF

B
2

cos

B
2

22 J 0 A RF J 2 A RF cos 2 B
2

J12 A RF sin 2

R
A

LW 2

sin 2f mt

cos 2 2f m t
2

where it is assumed that ARF << 1 and

components are neglected. This results in

RF
1 1 A

2
2

higher-order

cos B

840

ARF sin B sin 2f mt

1 RF
A
2

cos B cos2 2f mt

by using the Taylors expansion of the Bessel function. The

intensities of the fundamental component sin(2fmt) and the
second-order harmonic cos(22fmt) are proportional to sinB
and cosB , respectively, and thus can be controlled by the dcbias B. When B=, the even order components in the output
R, including the carrier component exp(2if0t), become zero
and the average power |R| is minimum. The dominant
components are then the first-order upper sideband (USB) and
the first-order lower sideband (LSB). This modulation scheme,
called double sideband suppressed carrier (DSB-SC)
modulation, is suitable for generation of the RF signal, because
dispersion effects in optical fibers are suppressed. Moreover,
this scheme comprises very low phase noise and, for that
reason, avoids the necessity of expensive and complicated
digital signal processing or allows for coherent transmission
with advanced modulation formats such as quadrature phaseshift keying (QPSK).

Figure 3. BER over transmitted electrical power for a data rate of

10 Gb/s over a wireless distance of 0.5 m (squares) and 1.0 m (dots).
Measured values are presented in red color while the simulated value is
black. Inset at bottomleft corner shows the 10 Gb/s eye diagram over
0.5 m wireless transmission.

Figure 2. Measured optical spectra from the experimental system setup

featuring 10 Gb/s (NRZ-OOK) over a wireless distance of 1 m and a RF
carrier frequency of 84 GHz. The Spectra were taken at a) the output of
the millimeterwave generator, b) the output of the data modulator, c) the
output of the EDFA inside the photonic receiver and d) the output of the
photonic receiver.

measurements. Then the electrical signal is amplified by an

electrical high power amplifier and radiated by a W-band horn
antenna with a gain of 23 dBi. The same antenna type is used
for reception of the wireless RF signal, which is then amplified
to drive a high bandwidth TFPS MZM. The MZM is fed by a
polarization controlled 1550-nm carrier from a LD and is
biased at quadrature point to directly modulate the optical
carrier with the RF signal resulting in the optical spectrum
shown in Fig. 2c. This signal is then amplified by an EDFA to
counter the insertion loss of the MZM and is filtered by an
OBPF to suppress the carrier and one of the two sidebands
leaving only one sideband including data for further optical
transmission (Fig. 2d).

B. Experimental System Setup & Measurement Results

Shown in Fig. 1 is the system setup used for experimental
characterization. It basically consists of a photonic mm-wave
generator, a data modulator, a photonic transmitter and a
photonic receiver. The mm-wave generator is a 1550 nm laser
diode (LD) with 15 dBm output power, followed by a
polarization controller (PC) to set optimum polarization state
for the following dual-drive MZM, which is biased at
minimum transmission point and driven by a local oscillator
(LO) with a frequency of 42 GHz, which is half the frequency
of the desired wireless frequency, to generate a DSB-SC signal.
To further suppress the carrier, an optical isolator (OI) and a
fiber bragg grating (FBG) with a free spectral range of 5 GHz
follow. The FBG reflects only the optical carrier and the OI
suppresses its reflection. After optical amplification with an
erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), amplified spontaneous
emission noise from this amplifier and additional higher order
sidebands are suppressed with an optical band-pass filter
(OBPF) resulting in a DSB-SC signal with a carrier
suppression of approximately 50 dB shown in Fig. 2a. The
signal is passed on to the data modulator which consists of a
PC, an intensity modulator (IM) and an EDFA. The IM
modulates the data signal, which is an on-off keyed (OOK)
pseudo random bit sequence (PRBS) with a word length of
231-1, onto both sidebands. This data modulated signal, shown
in Fig. 2b, travels over an optical fiber to the photonic
transmitter. The photonic transmitter consists of a PC followed
by a high-speed photodiode (PD, f3dB = 100 GHz), which
converts the optical DSB-SC signal into an electrical RF signal
at 84 GHz. A variable optical attenuator (VOA) is inserted in
front of the PC and the PD for bit error ratio (BER)

BER measurements over a wireless distance of 0.5 m and

1.0 m, respectively, and the eye diagram of 10 Gb/s NRZ-OOK
with 0.5 m wireless transmission are shown in Fig. 3. For
comparison, also included in this figure are simulated values of
the BER. To protect the high-speed PD from severe
degradation, a limit was set to the optical input power to the
high-speed PD in the experiment, resulting in a maximum
transmitted electrical power of 0 dBm. As can be seen from
Fig. 3, the measured and simulated BER values agree very
well. The slight differences in the BER are considered to be
due to environmental influences that have not been taken into
account in the simulation, such as multipath propagation.
According to the simulations, an electrical power penalty of
approximately 6 dB is expected when doubling the wireless
transmission distance from 0.5 m to 1.0 m. Error-free operation
of 10 Gb/s, which we define at BER < 10-9 without forward
error correction (FEC), is achieved at -1 dBm transmitted
electrical power for 0.5 m wireless transmission distance.
Considering the 6 dB electrical power penalty, that would
mean 1.0 m wireless transmission would reach that limit at
about 5 dBm transmitted electrical power, if no saturation
effects occur. When applying FEC, the required BER must be

841

better than 210-3. As can be seen from Fig. 3, this is already

achieved at -12 dBm and -6 dBm transmitted electrical power
for 0.5 m and 1.0 m wireless distance, respectively. It should be
noted, that the experiment was carried out in a laboratory
environment. For outdoor experiments 45 dBi antennas have to
be used, which would increase the SNR in the wireless domain
by 40 dB, which would increase the wireless range by a factor
of 100. Moreover, MZMs with a modulation bandwidth up to
300 GHz have been reported in [16]. Such devices would
decrease the required SNR at the receiver and thus increase the
range even more.
III.

[4]

[5]

[6]

CONCLUSION

[7]

In this paper, we have presented a photonic wireless bridge

capable of extending optical fiber based networks in a
disastrous scenario or for mobile backhauling. Due to coherent
generation with the cascaded RF and data modulation
approach, the system allows for tuning the wireless carrier over
the complete W-band (75110 GHz). Short-range wireless
transmission at 84 GHz of up to 10 Gb/s NRZ-OOK data is
demonstrated experimentally. At a transmit power level of
-12 dBm, a BER below the FEC level is achieved for 10 Gb/s.
The direct conversion technique from RF signal to optical
signals based on a high-speed MZM can provide format-free
conversion, and thus, it is easy to optimize spectral efficiency
with advanced modulation formats.

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was conducted as a part of the project entitled
Research and Development of high-precision imaging
technology using 90 GHz band linear cells, with the funding
from Research and Development to Expand Radio Frequency
Resources supported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and
Communications, Japan.

[13]

[14]

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