1396
15, AUGUST 1, 2018
A Long-Distance Millimeter-Wave RoF System
With a Low-Cost Directly Modulated Laser
Siming Liu, Peng-Chun Peng, Mu Xu, Daniel Guidotti, Huiping Tian , and Gee-Kung Chang, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract— We have experimentally demonstrated a world
record of transmitting 60-GHz radio frequency signals over
200-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) through a novel end-
to-end fiber-wireless integration and transport scheme using a
low-cost directly modulated laser without requiring expensive
optical dispersion compensation component and an external mod-
ulator. We designed a special dual-stage single-sideband (SSB)
modulation and power-detection scheme to overcome the power
fading caused by severe chromatic dispersion. The SSB signals
are generated by the operations in both optical and electrical
domains to avoid any possible beating between the two sidebands.
In the experiment, QPSK wireless signals at 14 Gb/s are suc-
cessfully transmitted through a 200-km SSMF and 1-m 60-GHz
wireless channel with a bit error rate less than 3.8 × 10−3 .
The proposed dual-stage SSB modulation and power-detection
scheme are free of expensive devices, such as microwave sources,
dispersion compensation components, narrow-linewidth laser
sources, or external optical modulators.
Index Terms— Radio frequency photonics, frequency filtering,
optical fiber dispersion.
I. I NTRODUCTION
A S THE development of communication systems, the low-
frequency spectrum resource used for wireless communi-
cations is very scarce. Therefore, the attention of radio system
designers has been pushed torward higher frequency resources
to satisfy the increased capacity [1]. The millimeter-wave
(mm-wave) band from 30 GHz to 300 GHz offers a large
bunch of spectrum, potentially forming the basis for the next
revolution in wireless communications [2]. The V-band fre-
quency stands out by its large available bandwidth especially
the unlicensed band around 57-64 GHz [3]. However, different
from lower radio frequency (<6 GHz), the 60-GHz band
contributes about 15 dB/km of attenuation in addition to free
space losses, which greatly limits the wireless transmission
distance.
Manuscript received May 10, 2018; revised May 31, 2018; accepted
June 19, 2018. Date of publication June 25, 2018; date of current version
July 10, 2018. This work was supported in part by the NSF I/UCRC
Center of Fiber-Wireless Integration and Networking, in part by NSFC under
Grant 61431003 and Grant 61372038, and in part by the Fund of the
State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications,
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. (Corresponding author:
Huiping Tian.)
S. Liu and H. Tian are with the State Key Laboratory of Information
Photonics and Optical Communications, School of Information and Telecom-
munication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications,
Beijing 100876, China (e-mail: hptian@bupt.edu.cn).
P.-C. Peng is with the Department of Electro-Optical Engineering, National
Taipei University of Technology, Taipei 10608, Taiwan.
M. Xu, D. Guidotti, and G.-K. Chang are with the School of Electri-
cal and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta,
GA 30308 USA (e-mail: gkchang@ece.gatech.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2018.2850705
1041-1135 © 2018 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 30, NO.
Radio-over-fiber (RoF) technology can overcome the draw-
backs associated with the high attenuation of mm-wave signal
transmissions. Advantages of RoF technology include high
spectral efficiency, low signaling latency, centralization of
expensive equipment and, therefore, low operational cost.
Mm-wave RoF systems take full advantages of wireless and
optical communications and greatly increase the broadband
wireless transmission distance. However, the benefits of the
RoF are difficult to harvest because of the impediments in
analog domain, among which are (i) power fading effects
due to fiber chromatic dispersions, (ii) direct modulation
nonlinearity and chirp, (iii) post optical-to-electrical (O/E)
conversion distortion. When the mm-wave modulated signal
propagates along a dispersive fiber, the two sidebands will
experience different amount of phase shift relative to the
optical carrier. The received fluctuated RF power depends
on relative phase difference between the two beat compo-
nents. The impact of fiber chromatic dispersion becomes more
obvious with increasing mm-wave frequency [4]. Most of
the RoF transmissions are completed by intensity-modulation
and direct-detection (IM-DD) scheme with external modu-
lators [5]–[7]. Reference [7] successfully transmits signals
through 150-km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) using
two Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZMs) and digital phase
noise suppression schemes. In order to further increase the
transmission distance and bandwidth, the long-reach signaling
by RoF mm-wave communications has recently been shown
feasible through an 80-km length of SSMF using an expensive
external modulator and a coherent receiver [8], [9]. However,
the complexity, cost and power dissipation of coherent receiver
detract from the practical operation of the feasibility demon-
strations. In another more cost-effective feasibility demonstra-
tion, it used a directly modulated laser (DML) with optical
single sideband (SSB) modulations to establish a mm-wave
long-distance RoF link [10]. Some publications used remote
heterodyne technique with an envelope detector to extend
the transmission distance [11]–[13]. They proposed remote
heterodyne techniques by using optical SSB and the maximum
fiber distance and bit rate are 90 km and 7.5 Gbps.
As an enhanced remote heterodyne scheme operated in both
optical and electrical fields, in this letter, we demonstrate
60-GHz signaling over a record 200-km RoF SSMF link using
a cost-effective DML without any dispersion compensation
component and external modulation. We have introduced
a special dual-stage SSB modulation and power-detection
scheme to overcome the power fading caused by severe
chromatic dispersion. The phase difference between the two
sidebands after long-distance SSMF transmissions caused by
chromatic dispersion leads to serious power fading effect on
the channel frequency response. We firstly design a novel
SSB signals operated in both optical and electrical domains
to avoid any possible beating between the two sidebands.
LIU et al.: LONG-DISTANCE mm-WAVE RoF SYSTEM WITH A LOW-COST DML
Fig. 1. Structure of the proposed long-distance mm-wave RoF system with
dual-stage SSB modulations. CO: central office, BS: base station, UE: user
equipment.
Fig. 2. Spectral representation of the dual-stage enhanced SSB modulation
and power-detection scheme.
The traditional remote heterodyne technique only generates the
signals in optical domain without considering the overlap after
down-conversions caused by the two sidebands at the millime-
ter wave. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed
scheme can deliver 14-Gbps QPSK signals through 200-km
SSMF, followed by 1-m, 60-GHz wireless transmissions pass-
ing the bit error rate (BER) threshold of 3.8×10−3. The
scheme is implemented with no need for expensive devices,
making the long-distance rural broadband wireless services
profitable.
II. O PERATING P RINCIPLE
Fig. 1 gives the transmission structure of the proposed long-
distance RoF system with dual-stage SSB modulation and
power-detection scheme. The digital processing power of the
network is allocated at the central office (CO), simplifying the
base stations (BS) with analog photo detector (PD), electrical
amplifiers and antennas. With the proposed dual-stage SSB
modulations, the RoF propagation distance over SSMF could
be increased from 20 km 10-fold up to about 200 km. Then,
a service provider’s capital investment and operational cost
may be significantly reduced to provide affordable broad-
band access service to remote rural areas. Fig. 2 shows
the optical “red” and electrical “blue” spectra pertinent of
the proposed dual-stage SSB modulation and power-detection
scheme. SSMF transports two optical tones near 1550 nm
separated by 60 GHz. One of the optical tones is modulated
by an intermediate frequency (IF) f IF signal and this is
Stage I of the dual-stage SSB modulation. The two optical
sidebands interfere at an O/E converter, usually a square-
law PD, resulting in a set of beating frequency components,
among which are a modulated electrical millimeter wave at
about 60 GHz with signal sidebands, a baseband signal at
the modulation frequency, IF as well as unwanted frequency
aliases. Because the optical carrier and its sidebands are
transmitted along the fiber at different velocities, a phase
difference builds up, as a function of propagation length,
1397
between the two optical tones and the two signal sidebands.
The latter phase difference is retained in the electrical field
after O/E conversion and causes beat interference in the
power detection bandwidth. To remove the unwanted baseband
electrical aliases, a mm-wave filter can be used to remove one
of the two sidebands to form an electrical SSB signal and
this operation is Stage II of the dual-stage SSB modulations.
In practice, it may be unnecessary to specially design a
mm-wave filter because the bandwidth of the antenna radiator
itself may be designed to be sufficiently narrow so as to
remove the undesired aliases. In this case, a square-law power
detector or envelope detector can be used to down-convert the
mm-wave signals to the baseband IF. Without removing one of
the sidebands in the mm-wave frequency spectrum, the phase
difference generated during the propagation of optical channel
results in aliases that would appear as signal fading in the
detection bandwidth. The enhanced dual-stage SSB scheme
avoids any possible sideband-to-sideband beating in the two
steps of square-law detections, one is O/E conversion and the
other is power detection. This scheme is free of expensive
devices such as microwave sources, dispersion compensation
components or external optical modulators. The phase noise
of the 60-GHz wireless carrier and signal is coherent and
it can be completely eliminated after the square-law down-
conversion. Therefore, there is no strict requirements on the
linewidth of the modulated laser source or its optical local
oscillator. The down-conversion with a local oscillator and a
mixer is difficult because of the phase noise and frequency
discrepancy impairments of the mm-wave signals.
III. E XPERIMENTAL S ETUP AND R ESULTS
Fig. 3 shows the experimental setup of the DML-based
60-GHz 200-km RoF system with the dual-stage enhanced
SSB modulation and power-detection scheme. The 14-Gbps
QPSK signals are generated by an arbitrary waveform gen-
erator (AWG) running at 56 GSa/s. Frequency domain pre-
equalization (pre-FDE) is employed to adjust the uneven
frequency channel response with an FFT/IFFT size of 1024.
We convolve each transmitted symbol waveform truncated
from −16 T to 16 T (T is the symbol duration) and the
roll-off factor of the square-root-raised-cosine (SRRC) filter
is 0.1. The IF electrical carrier f IF is 7.5 GHz. Although
the signals with more bandwidth have more signal-to-signal
beat interference (SSBI) (up to 7 GHz with 14-Gbps QPSK),
the 14-Gbps QPSK signals still can meet the BER of forward
error correction (FEC) limit.
The QPSK signals directly drive a DFB laser emitting at
a wavelength of 1539.77 nm and biased by a DC current
of 145 mA. A tunable external cavity laser (ECL) operating
at a wavelength of 1540.25 nm with output power of 2 dBm
provides a local oscillator (LO) for O/E conversion at a PD.
To further obtain the better spectral efficiency and signal
performance, an optimal power ratio of 2 dB between the
two lasers is set by using the optical attenuator after the DFB
laser in this experiment. The outputs from the two lasers
are combined into 200-km SSMF by a 3-dB coupler and
amplified by an Erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA). The
optical spectrum is shown in Fig. 3(a). The PD mixes the
two optical field tones to produce the powered components of
the frequency at the sum and difference. The sum frequency
falls out of the range of the PD and the difference results
in the signal sidebands being moved to millimeter wave and
baseband. The unwanted aliases are easily eliminated by a
1398 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 30, NO. 15, AUGUST 1, 2018

Fig. 3. Experimental setup of the DML-based 60-GHz 200-km RoF system with dual-stage SSB modulation and power detection. (a) is the optical spectrum
after fiber transmissions. (b) and (c) are the electrical spectrum of the signals before and after power detection. AWG: arbitrary waveform generator, pre-FDE:
frequency domain pre-equalization, SRRC: square root raised cosine, DML: directly modulated laser, ECL: external cavity laser, PC: polarization controller,
OA: optical attenuator, OC: optical coupler, EDFA: Erbium doped fiber amplifier, SSMF: standard single mode fiber, PD: photo detector, EA: electrical
amplifier, LPF: low-pass filter.

Fig. 4. Measured and simulated normalized received RF power for Stage I

and dual-stage SSB modulations as functions of frequency for the 200-km
SSMF RoF system.

combination of mm-wave amplifiers and the antennas with

band-pass response bandwidths. For example, our mm-wave
amplifiers have a bandwidth of 55-65 GHz, while our horn
antennas have a bandwidth of 50-75 GHz. The wireless
received signals are directly captured by a high-speed sampling
scope with a 63-GHz 3-dB bandwidth and 160-GSa/s sampling
rate. The square-law power detection is realized offline in
Matlab, and a low-pass filter (LPF) is used to absorb the
power at frequencies greater than 15 GHz. In practice, we can
realize this step by a mm-wave square-law power or envelope
detector and the high-speed sampling scope is not necessary.
However, we need the high-speed sampling scope to capture
the mm-wave signals to verify the theory. Fig. 3(b) shows
the electrical spectrum of the mm-wave SSB signals before
power detection. The upper sideband of the mm-wave sig-
nals is naturally removed because of the bandwidth limit
of the sampling scope (∼63 GHz). The mm-wave signals
retain the phase noise caused by the temporally incoherent
lightwave from the two individual lasers. Fig. 3(c) shows the
spectrum of the baseband signals after power detection and
the down-converted signals are immune to the phase noise
from lasers, therefore loosening the linewidth requirements on
the laser devices. Then, fIF down-conversion, SRRC filtering,
Fig. 5. BER performances of SSB modulations with Stage I only and dual
stages for varying fiber distances. Electrical spectrum of the received signals
in the case of (a) Stage I only and (b) dual-stage SSB modulations over
200-km SSMF.
least mean square (LMS) equalization and QPSK as well as
Gray code de-mapping are realized in the subsequent Matlab
processing.
Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 compare the performances of SSB
modulations with Stage I only and dual stages, prior to
the mm-wave free-space transmissions. The case “Stage I
only” is actually the traditional remote heterodyne scheme
proposed in [13] with similar experimental setup, leaving
double-sideband signals at millimeter wave after PD. The
comparisons demonstrate the superiority of the proposed dual-
stage SSB scheme. Fig. 4 shows that without Stage II filtering,
a fluctuating frequency response (fading) can be observed
after 200-km SSMF. However, in the dual-stage SSB, double-
sideband beating is avoided and the channel is free of power
LIU et al.: LONG-DISTANCE mm-WAVE RoF SYSTEM WITH A LOW-COST DML
Fig. 6. Optical spectrums of the DML and optical LO within 1.5 hours.
Fig. 7. BER performances of the dual-stage SSB transmissions as functions
of optical received power for different data rates.
Fig. 8. BER performances of the dual-stage SSB transmissions as functions
of optical received power for different fiber distances.
fading, making the channel response usable. Fig. 5 verifies
the improved BER performance when using the dual-stage
SSB. The signal spectrum in Fig. 5(a) demonstrates that the
power fading occurs in the absence of Stage II operation.
Employing the proposed dual-stage SSB, a relatively flat
frequency response can be observed, and the inter-symbol
interference can be mitigated by the traditional LMS equalizer.
Therefore, we still can obtain a good BER performance of
the signals after 200-km SSMF transmissions. The optical
spectrum measured in 1.5 hours shown in Fig. 6 confirms
that the frequency fluctuation is acceptable for the 60 GHz to
be used as a carrier. Actually, in the single-user transmission
case, the carrier frequency fluctuation caused by the laser
wavelength shift is not the issue because the square-law
down-conversion scheme is unrelated to the exact mm-wave
frequency positions. Fig. 7 shows the BER performances with
both SSMF and 60-GHz wireless transmissions as a function
of QPSK data rate and that the increasing SSBI greatly
degrades the signal quality as the bit rate increases. The inset
in Fig. 7 gives the BER performance of the system as a
1399
function of driving voltage. The results exhibit that 360 mV
is the optimal driving power considering the signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR) and nonlinearity in the system. Fig. 8 demonstrates
that our scheme transmits 14-Gbps QPSK signals through
the 200-km SSMF and 1-m 60-GHz V-band wireless channel
under FEC limit of BER 3.8×10−3. The wireless transmission
distance is limited by the low gain of our mm-wave amplifiers
and antennas. The wireless transmission distance can be extent
to thousands of meters with the help of powerful devices [9].
IV. C ONCLUSION
We propose a DML-based 60-GHz RoF transmission system
with a novel dual-stage SSB modulation as an enhanced
remote heterodyne technique. The proposed dual-stage SSB
modulation scheme shows its advantage over the traditional
remote heterodyne technique by mitigating the power fading
effect caused by chromatic dispersion in long-haul fiber-
wireless transmissions. QPSK wireless signals at 14 Gbps
are successfully transmitted through a 200-km SSMF and
1-m 60-GHz wireless channel with a BER less than 3.8×10−3.
The proposed scheme is cost effective and free of expen-
sive or specially designed devices in the system. Therefore,
broadband services over millimeter wave can be realized
for the remote rural area with reduced cost in both system
operation and hardware implementation.
R EFERENCES
[1] P. Wang, Y. Li, L. Song, and B. Vucetic, “Multi-gigabit millimeter
wave wireless communications for 5G: From fixed access to cellular
networks,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 168–178, Jan. 2015.
[2] D. Lockie and D. Peck, “High-data-rate millimeter-wave radios,” IEEE
Microw. Mag., vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 75–83, Aug. 2009.
[3] S. Liu, Y. M. Alfadhli, S. Shen, H. Tian, and G.-K. Chang, “Mitigation
of multi-user access impairments in 5G A-RoF-based mobile fronthaul
utilizing machine learning for an artificial neural network nonlinear
equalizer,” in Proc. Opt. Netw. Commun. Conf. Exhib. (OFC), 2018,
Paper W4B.3.
[4] C. Lim et al., “Fiber-wireless networks and subsystem technologies,”
J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 390–405, Feb. 15, 2010.
[5] C.-T. Lin, S.-C. Chiang, C.-H. Li, H.-T. Huang, C.-H. Lin, and
B.-J. Lin, “V-band gapless OFDM RoF system with power detector
down-conversion and novel Volterra nonlinear filtering,” Opt. Lett.,
vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 207–210, 2017.
[6] J. Zhang, J. Yu, N. Chi, F. Li, and X. Li, “Experimental demonstra-
tion of 24-Gb/s CAP-64QAM radio-over-fiber system over 40-GHz
mm-wave fiber-wireless transmission,” Opt. Express, vol. 21, no. 22,
pp. 26888–26895, 2013.
[7] C.-C. Wei, C.-T. Lin, H.-T. Huang, W.-L. Liang, and S. Chi, “Estimation
and suppression of dispersion-induced phase noise in W-band direct-
detection OFDM radio-over-fiber systems,” J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 32,
no. 20, pp. 3874–3884, Oct. 15, 2014.
[8] J. Yu, X. Li, and N. Chi, “Faster than fiber: Over 100-Gb/s signal
delivery in fiber wireless integration system,” Opt. Express, vol. 21,
no. 19, pp. 22885–22904, 2013.
[9] X. Li et al., “Bidirectional delivery of 54-Gbps 8QAM W-band signal
and 32-Gbps 16QAM K-band signal over 20-km SMF-28 and 2500-m
wireless distance,” in Proc. Opt. Netw. Commun. Conf. Exhib. (OFC),
2017, pp. 1–3, Paper Th5A.7.
[10] C.-T. Tsai, Y.-C. Chi, P.-C. Peng, and G.-R. Lin, “Long-reach MMWoF
using single-sideband modulated dual-mode VCSEL with 16-QAM
OFDM at 8 Gbit/s,” in Proc. Opt. Netw. Commun. Conf. Exhib. (OFC),
2017, pp. 1–3, Paper Tu2F.3.
[11] I. G. Insua, D. Plettemeier, and C. G. Schaffer, “Simple remote het-
erodyne radio-over-fiber system for gigabit per second wireless access,”
J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 28, no. 16, pp. 2289–2295, Aug. 15, 2010.
[12] O. Omomukuyo, M. P. Thakur, and J. E. Mitchell, “Simple 60-GHz
MB-OFDM ultrawideband RoF system based on remote heterodyning,”
IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 268–271, Feb. 1, 2013.
[13] I. Aldaya, G. Campuzano, C. Gosset, and G. Castañón, “Phase-
insensitive RF envelope detection allows optical heterodyning of MHz-
linewidth signals,” IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 25, no. 22,
pp. 2193–2196, Nov. 15, 2013.