Optical technologies for Multi-Gbit/s ultra-wideband radio: From the access to the pico-cell

This paper reports the latest developments in optical generation, transmission and electro-optical processing techniques enabling wireless connectivity to a large number of users employing ultra-wideband (UWB) radio. In particular, the latest advances in UWB generation at 60 GHz and ultra-low power sensing employing photonic analogue-to-digital converters are presented altogether with novel transmission architectures like UWB pico-cell clusters. The techniques herein reported permit the cost-effective spectrum-efficient provision of multi-Gigabit connectivity and present an enabling step to the introduction of cognitive techniques maximizing the overall network capacity.