A Photonic Transceiver for the Aggregation and Disaggregation of Microwave Signals Based on an Optical Frequency Comb Source

A photonic transceiver for the aggregation and disaggregation of microwave signals based on an optical frequency comb source is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The key device is a dual-polarization dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator (DP-DDMZM) which is employed to perform signal aggregation and disaggregation. In the aggregation mode, four binary phase shift keying (BPSK) microwave signals with each having a bit rate of 2 Gbps at different frequencies received by four antennas are aggregated into two quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) single-sideband (SSB) modulation optical signals with orthogonal polarizations. The spectral efficiency is quadrupled with a combined bit rate of 8 Gbps. After coherent detection, the aggregated signals are decoded. The error vector amplitude (EVM) is 19.93% and the bit error rate (BER) is 2.61 X 10 ⁻⁷ . In the disaggregation mode, a QPSK microwave signal with a bit rate of 4 Gbps received by an antenna is disaggregated into two BPSK optical signals, with each disaggregated signal having a bit rate of 2 Gbps and an EVM of 13.75%.