Demonstration of Low-Complexity D-band Extension of Fiber X-haul for 5G and Beyond Infrastructure

This work presents a seamless integration of a wireless D-band transmission link to a fiber network. The D-band wireless transmission is performed by utilizing recently developed direct up-/down-conversion and high gain flat EBG antennas, thus resolving the issue of high complexity and cost of the optical heterodyne mixing adopted until now for the generation of the D-band signals in fiber-wireless implementations. More specifically the transmission of a baseband signal up to 12.5GB/s as well the QAM modulated IF signal up to 256QAM 900Mbaud is demonstrated successfully validating the potential of D-band link to become the next "last mile" wireless extension of mobile networks.