SNR improved digital-delta-sigma-modulation radio-over-fiber scheme for D-band 4.6-km photonics-aided wireless fronthaul.

We propose a digital-delta-sigma-modulation radio-over-fiber (DDSM-RoF) scheme for wireless fronthaul and validate it experimentally in a D-band photonics-aided RoF transmission system. The 10-Gbaud DDSM-RoF signal with a common public radio interface equivalent data rate (CPRI-EDR) of 55.8 Gb/s is successfully transmitted in a 130-GHz 4.6-km wireless channel. The spectral efficiency (SE) is 5.58 bit/s/Hz and the capacity-distance product reaches 257 Gb/s·km. Up to 34.4-dB recovered signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is observed to support the 1024-quadrature-amplitude-modulation (1024-QAM) transmission. Compared with the digital-analog-RoF (DA-RoF) scheme, the proposed DDSM-RoF achieves an SNR improvement of 5.9 dB.