Multi-IF-Over-Fiber Based Mobile Fronthaul With Blind Linearization and Flexible Dispersion Induced Bandwidth Penalty Mitigation

The nonlinear degradations and chromatic dispersion induced bandwidth penalty are critical obstacles for implementing the analog radio-over-fiber (A-RoF) technique in future mobile fronthaul (MFH). In this paper, we propose an analog multiple intermediate-frequency-over-fiber (multi-IFoF) MFH system with blind linearity improvement and flexible dispersion-induced bandwidth penalty mitigation. The bias adjustment of a single-electrode driven dual-drive Mach–Zehnder modulator is used to compensate the bandwidth penalty arising from the dispersion-induced power fading of fiber links in different lengths. This operation can increase the available bandwidth for the MFH system free of even-order intermodulation distortions (IMDs). At the receiver, a self-adaptive digital post-processing algorithm is introduced to blindly improve the linearity of the IFoF MFH system by suppressing the residual odd-order IMDs, with no need of training signals or prior knowledge of the transmission channel. In the proof-of-concept experiments, the transmission of 64-QAM-OFDM signals in 1 to 12 IF channels with a 500-MHz bandwidth has been demonstrated over standard single-mode fibers (SSMFs) of 20, 50, and 100 km. For the 50-km (or 100-km) SSMF, the bandwidth penalty for a broadband signal with a bandwidth of 4.5 GHz (or 2.5 GHz) is fully compensated. In addition, the proposed post-processing algorithm can significantly suppress the odd-order IMDs and thus improve the linearity by greater than 5.4 dB in terms of the input RF power range which retains an acceptable error-vector-magnitude (EVM) performance for the 64-QAM-OFDM signal.