Performance Comparison of Analog and Digitized RoF Systems With Nonlinear Channel Condition

Abstract

We have compared the performance of analog and digitized radio-over-fiber (RoF) systems with a nonlinear channel condition to investigate which one is more suitable for in-building wireless backhauling. For the comparison, we demonstrated optical multicasting of Wi-Fi compatible signals over both RoF links with nonlinear wavelength conversion, and measured error vector magnitude (EVM) performance of the transmitted wireless signals. In the demonstration, the digitized RoF system showed constant performance with EVM (3.75%), while the performance of analog counterpart is highly dependent on optical link conditions.