Investigation of signal-to-noise ratio performance of microwave photonic links enhanced by optical injection locking and channelized spectrum stitching

A signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement method for microwave photonic (MWP) links enhanced by optical injection locking (OIL) and channelized spectrum stitching (CSS) is investigated and experimentally demonstrated. By exploiting the resonant amplification characteristics of OIL, both optical gain and in-band noise suppression of the input radio frequency signal can be achieved. The injection bandwidth is channelized to further suppress noise during OIL, and the input signal can be well reconstructed by spectrum stitching in the digital domain. Experimental results show that the optimal improvement in SNR of 3.6 dB is achieved for linear frequency modulated signals and at least an additional improvement of 7.2 dB can be obtained by adopting CSS. Other broadband signals for radar and communication are used to further verify the ability to improve SNR. The potential for application scenarios with large operating bandwidth and high optical gain is also demonstrated. (C) 2022 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement