Optics and Laser Technology 103 (2018) 267–271

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Optics and Laser Technology

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Full length article

Full duplex radio over fiber system with frequency quadrupled

millimeter-wave signal generation based on polarization multiplexing
Wenjing Xu, Xinlu Gao ⇑, Mingyang Zhao, Mutong Xie, Shanguo Huang
State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: A full duplex radio over fiber system with frequency quadrupled millimeter-wave signal generation
Received 3 September 2017 based on polarization multiplexing using a single-drive intensity modulator is proposed and experimen-
Received in revised form 30 November 2017 tally demonstrated. At the central station, downstream signal modulated on the single-drive intensity
Accepted 9 January 2018
modulator is polarization multiplexed with pure optical carrier by a polarization beam combiner (PBC)
before transmitted over the single mode fiber to the base station. The single-drive intensity modulator
is biased at the maximum transmission point to generate optical carrier and two second-order sidebands.
Keywords:
At the base station, by simply adjusting the difference angle between the principle axis of polarizer and
Microwave photonics
Millimeter-wave signal generation
one principle axis of PBC to 135°, a frequency quadrupled millimeter-wave signal is generated. In addi-
Double sideband modulation tion, when the difference angle between the principle axis of polarizer and one principle axis of PBC is
adjusted to 90°, the original pure optical carrier is recovered, which is wavelength reused to provide light
source for the uplink to deliver upstream signal. A proof-of-concept experiment is performed. Pure opti-
cal carrier and 40 GHz millimeter-wave signal with 20 dB optical harmonic suppression ratio are
obtained. The power penalties of the bidirectional links are less than 0.3 dB after transmitted over
10.5 km single mode fiber. The measured power fluctuation of the generated millimeter-wave signal is
less than 1 dB in one hour, showing the proposed scheme is relatively stable for long-distance transmis-
sion system.
Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction or phase modulators. Among them, as different optical sidebands

As the increasing demand for license-free spectrum resources,
radio over fiber (RoF) system has been a hot topic in recent years
thanks to its low loss, electromagnetic immunity and large band-
width [1–2]. To reduce the cost of the ever increasing amount of
base stations (BSs), it is highly recommended that the BS is simple
as far as possible. Therefore, different methods including the opti-
cal heterodyning [3], nonlinear effects [4–5] and external modula-
tion [6–8] methods are proposed to generate millimeter-wave
(mm-wave) signal at the BS. However, the optical heterodyning
method will cause a relative high phase noise, as the two optical
sources are incoherent. Nonlinear effects including four-wave mix-
ing [4] and stimulated Brillouin scattering [5] may cause a bulky
system and hard to implement in the real systems. However, the
external modulation methods including the double sideband
(DSB) [6], single sideband (SSB) [7] and optical carrier suppression
(OCS) [8–9] are the most common and cost-effective to generate
high multiplication electrical signal by using intensity modulators
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: xinlugao@bupt.edu.cn (X. Gao).
travel at different velocities in the fiber, DSB modulation suffered
from power fading effect. SSB modulation scheme solved this prob-
lem while it shows low spectrum efficiency and rarely used in the
RoF system. Instead, the OCS modulation scheme shows high spec-
trum efficiency and dispersion immunity, it received much popu-
larity in the RoF system. In addition, when the Mach-Zehnder
modulator (MZM) is biased at the maximum transmission point,
the optical carrier and two second-order sidebands are generated
[10–11]. After the optical carrier is eliminated by a wavelength-
selective device such as a narrow bandwidth optical filter [12],
fiber Bragg grating (FBG) [13] or interleaver [14–15], a frequency
quadrupled mm-wave signal is generated after optical/electrical
conversion. However, these wavelength-selective devices are
wavelength dependent, which limit the bandwidth of the overall
system.
In order to solve the above problem, RoF system with wave-
length reuse based on polarization multiplexing was investigated
recently [16–18]. By aligning the principle axes of the polarization
beam splitter (PBS) at the BS with the principle axes of the PBS at
the center station (CS), the optical carrier in one polarization direc-
tion is separated from the optical signal in the other polarization

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.optlastec.2018.01.035
0030-3992/Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
268 W. Xu et al. / Optics and Laser Technology 103 (2018) 267–271

direction easily [16], which simplify the system greatly with no
optical filter. However, the frequency multiplication factor of the
existed systems is only 1 [17–18], i.e., when 10 GHz RF signal is
applied at the transmitter, the generated RF signal of the receiver
is 10 GHz, which cannot make full use of the large bandwidth
mm-wave signal. Therefore, how to increase the frequency multi-
plication factor while not increase the system complexity is still
a problem.
In this paper, a full duplex RoF system with frequency quadru-
pled mm-wave signal generation based on polarization multiplex-
ing using a single-drive intensity modulator is experimentally
demonstrated. At the CS, the continuous wave is split into two
orthogonal polarization directions (i.e., x and y). The x-polarized
optical carrier is sent into a single-drive intensity modulator driven
by the downstream signal, while the y-polarized optical carrier is
keep unmodulated. The single-drive intensity modulator is biased
at the maximum transmission point to generate the optical carrier
and two second-order sidebands. Then the two orthogonally polar-
ized signals are combined by a PBC. At the BS, by aligning the prin-
ciple axis of a polarizer at an angle of 135° to one principle axis of
the PBC, the optical carriers with two orthogonal polarization
directions are canceled out and the frequency quadrupled mm-
wave signal is generated after optical/electrical conversion. On
the other hand, when the other polarizer with its principle axis
aligned at an angle of 90° to one principle axis of the PBC is
employed, pure optical carrier is recovered, which is then wave-
length reused to provide light source for the uplink. Experimental
results show that after transmitted over 10.5 km single mode fiber,
the power penalty of bidirectional 1 Gb/s pseudo random binary
sequence is less than 0.3 dB. Compared with the published RoF
studies, as no wavelength-dependent devices are required and a
frequency quadrupled 40 GHz mm-wave signal is generated in
the proposed scheme, the system is potentially wideband and
cost-effective.
2. Operation principle
The conceptual configuration of the full duplex RoF system is
shown in Fig. 1. The laser diode (LD) is split into two orthogonal
polarization directions (i.e., x-pol and y-pol) by a polarization
beam splitter (PBS). A polarization controller (PC1) set before PBS
is used to adjust the power splitting ratio c (0 < c < 1) of the x-
pol and y-pol directions flexibly. The x-polarized optical carrier is
fed into a MZM driven by RF signal carrying downlink baseband
signal Data1, and the MZM is biased at the maximum transmission
point to suppress the odd-order sidebands. While the y-polarized
optical carrier is keep unmodulated. Considering the characteris-
tics of the Bessel function of the first kind, the optical field at the
output of MZM can be mathematically expressed as:
Ex ¼ c½J 0 ðbÞ expðjxo tÞ þ J 2 ðbÞ exp jðxo þ 2xm Þt þ J 2 ðbÞ
 exp jðxo  2xm Þt ð1Þ
where xo and xm are the angular frequency of the optical and elec-
trical field, respectively. J n ðÞ is the n-th order Bessel function of the
first kind, b is the modulation index of the intensity modulator. And
the unmodulated y-polarized optical carrier can be written as:
Ey ¼ ð1  cÞ expðjxo tÞ ð2Þ
Then the two orthogonally polarized signals are polarization
multiplexed by a PBC. If a polarizer with its principle axis aligned
at an angle of h to one principle axis of the PBC is applied to incor-
porate Ex and Ey , the optical field at the output of the polarizer can
be shown as:
Epol ðtÞ ¼ cos hEx þ sin hEy
¼ ½c cos hJ 0 ðbÞ þ ð1  cÞ sin h exp jxo t þ c cos hJ 2 ðbÞ
 ½exp jðxo þ 2xm Þt þ exp jðxo  2xm Þt ð3Þ

Fig. 1. The schematic diagram of the proposed method and the optical spectra at the corresponding point: (A) the output of MZM1 along x-pol direction, (B) the y-polarized
optical carrier along y-pol direction, (C) the combined signal along h direction, (D) the output after the PL1, (E) the output after the PL2. CS: center station, LD: laser diode, PC:
polarization controller, PBS: polarization beam splitter, MZM: Mach-Zehnder modulator, PBC: polarization beam combiner, SMF: single mode fiber, OC: optical coupler, PL:
polarizer, BS: base station.
 W. Xu et al. / Optics and Laser Technology 103 (2018) 267–271 269

As can be seen from Eq. (3), when c cos hJ 0 ðbÞ þ ð1  cÞ sin h ¼ 0, 3. Experimental setup and results


i.e., h ¼ arctan  c1r
J0 ðbÞ
, we have
A proof-of-concept experiment setup is configured and shown
cð1  cÞ in Fig. 1. At the CS, a continuous wave signal centered at
Epol ðtÞ ¼  qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi J 2 ðbÞ½exp jðxo þ 2xm Þt
1546.32 nm is emitted from laser diode (Southern Photonics
ð1  cÞ2 þ c2 J 20 ðbÞ
TLS150D) before sent into MZM1 (Optilab) driven by 10 GHz RF
þ exp jðxo  2xm Þt ð4Þ signal carrying 1 Gb/s pseudo random binary sequence (PRBS)
downlink Data1 with a word length of 212  1. The MZM1 has a
The photocurrent of the generated mm-wave signal can be
bandwidth of 40 GHz and half wave voltage of 5 V. The 10 GHz
expressed as:
RF signal is generated by the Vector Signal Generator (Agilent
c2 ð1  cÞ2 J22 ðbÞ E3640A). Data1 and Data2 are generated by the Arbitrary Wave-
IðtÞ ¼ REpol ðtÞ  Epol ðtÞ ¼ 2R cosð4xm tÞ ð5Þ form Generator (Tektronix AWG70000). The PBS and PBC have a
ð1  cÞ2 þ c2 J 20 ðbÞ
minimum directivity of 50 dB and polarization extinction ratio of
where R is the responsivity of the photodiode. And it is clearly about 20 dB. The output at the optical field of the MZM1 is shown
seen that a frequency quadrupled RF signal is generated. On the in Fig. 2(a), and it can be seen that optical carrier and two second-
other hand, when cos h ¼ 0, i.e., h ¼ p=2, Epol ðtÞ becomes: order sidebands are generated. Fig. 2(b) shows the pure optical
carrier along y-pol direction. Then the two optical signals are com-
Epol ðtÞ ¼ Ey ¼ ð1  cÞ exp jxo t ð6Þ
bined by a PBC before transmitted over 10.5 km standard single
It can be seen that the y-polarized optical carrier is ideally mode fiber (SSMF) with a dispersion value of 17 ps/nm/km. At
recovered, and it is then wavelength reused to provide lightwave the BS, a 3 dB optical coupler (OC) is employed to divide the optical
source for the uplink. signal into two same branches. For the upper branch, PL1 with its

Fig. 2. The optical spectra at the point A, B, D, E labeled in Fig. 1.

270 W. Xu et al. / Optics and Laser Technology 103 (2018) 267–271

principle axis aligned by PC2 at an angle of 135° to one principle
axis of PBC is employed to suppress the optical carrier shown in
Fig. 2(c), which shows that the wavelength spacing of the two
second-order sidebands is 0.32 nm (40 GHz), and the optical car-
rier is 20 dB lower than the two second-order sidebands. Then
the two second-order sidebands are beaten at a PD which has a
responsivity and 3-dB bandwidth of 0.85 A/W @1550 nm and 40
GHz, respectively. A 40 GHz LO signal (Agilent E8257D) is applied
to down-convert the generated 40 GHz electrical signal to base-
band to measure the eye diagram and bit error rate (BER) of the
downlink signal. For the lower branch, PL2 with its principle axis
aligned by PC3 at an angle of 90° to one principle axis of PBC is
used to recover the pure optical carrier shown in Fig. 2(d). Com-
pared with the optical carrier in Fig. 2(b), it can be observed that
small phase noise is existed, but it is too small to be considered.
Then it is remodulated by the uplink signal Data2 via MZM2 before
transmitted back to the CS through another 10.5 km SSMF. In addi-
tion, in order to ensure that the time delays along the two orthog-
onal polarization directions are identical, an extra 2 m
polarization-maintaining fiber is employed along y-pol direction
at the CS.
Fig. 3 shows the bit error rate (BER) versus received optical
power of the downlink and uplink at the back to back (BTB) and
10.5 km SSMF transmission distance cases. For the downlink, 0.3
dB power penalty is achieved due to the unideal performance of
fiber and insignificant phase fluctuation. For the uplink, only 0.1
dB power penalty is achieved, which shows that the interference
from downlink is negligible and pure optical carrier is recovered
to provide light source for the uplink. The eye diagrams of down-
link and uplink signal at BTB cases keep wide open, which show
a good transmission performance.
In order to explore the nonideal factors that contribute to 20 dB
optical harmonic suppression ratio (OHDSR) in our system, we
simulated the OHDSR versus power unbalance and phase differ-
ence of the optical carrier along the two orthogonal polarization
directions shown in Fig. 4. It can be seen that small power unbal-
ance or phase difference may cause a relatively large OHDSR degra-
dation, and when the power unbalance is larger than 1 dB or the
phase difference is larger than 10°, the OHDSR is about zero, so
the power and phase of the optical carrier in the two orthogonal
polarization directions should be equal as far as possible. In addi-
tion, the system may suffer from the polarization drift accumu-
lated continuously over time. In the experiment, we also
investigated the stability of the proposed RoF link by measuring
the power fluctuation of the generated mm-wave signal shown
in Fig. 5 in a time period of one hour, it can be seen that only small

Fig. 3. BER values versus received optical power for downlink and uplink.

Fig. 4. The simulated OHDSR degradation due to (a) power unbalance, (b) phase difference.
 W. Xu et al. / Optics and Laser Technology 103 (2018) 267–271
Fig. 5. The power of the generated mm-wave signal in a period of one hour.
power fluctuation is observed. And if the PCs are replaced by the
commercial-available automatic polarization trackers [19–20]
which have been proposed by many reports, the system can be
much more stable for long term RoF systems.
4. Conclusions
A full duplex radio over fiber system with frequency quadrupled
millimeter-wave signal generation based on polarization multi-
plexing using a single-drive intensity modulator is experimentally
demonstrated. Without any optical filters, a 40 GHz mm-wave sig-
nal is generated and pure optical carrier is wavelength reused to
provide optical source for the BS. Successful delivery of bidirec-
tional 1 Gb/s PRBS data with less than 0.3 dB power penalty after
10.5 km SSMF transmission is realized. The proposed scheme is
simple, cost-effective and may be attractive to future high
throughput telecommunication applications.
Acknowledgements
This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (Nos. 61690195, 61575028 and 61605015),
the National Science Foundation for Outstanding Youth Scholars
of China (61622102); the fundamental Research Funds for the Cen-
tral Universities (Nos. 2016RCGD21, 2016RC26), the Program for
New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-12-0793), the
Beijing Nova Program (No. 2011065), the Open Funds of IPOC
(IPOC2016ZT03), and the Science and Technology Project of State
Grid Corporation of China under Grant SGLNDK00KJJS1700200.
271
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