A full-duplex radio-over-fiber system with centralized light source and bidirectional fiber transmission based on optical sideband reuse

A full-duplex radio-over-fiber (ROF) system with centralized light source and bidirectional fiber transmission is proposed and experimentally demonstrated based on optical sideband reuse in the base station (BS). The proposed ROF system has a simple structure in the central office (CO) using only one dual-parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator (DPMZM) to simultaneously generate two first order sidebands and modulate the optical carrier with the downstream base band signal. In the BS, the downstream RF signal is generated by beating the optical carrier with one of the sidebands at a photo-detector, and the other optical sideband is reused as a light source and modulated by the upstream RF signal. No frequency up/down-conversion is needed in the BS, which also leads to a simplified system configuration. A proof-of-concept experiment is carried out. Performance of the established 18 GHz full-duplex ROF system with bidirectional transmission through 20 km single mode fiber (SMF) is investigated. The results verify that the proposed architecture is a good candidate for future high-speed and low-cost ROF networks.