An All-photonic Digital Radio over Fiber architecture

Radio over Fiber (RoF) technology uses optical fiber links to distribute RF signals from a central station to multiple remote access units due to its ability to provide simple antenna front ends, increased capacity, and multi radio wireless access coverage. In this paper, an All-photonic Digital Radio over Fiber (DRoF) architecture is proposed and its performance is individually investigated in a dedicated and an integrated fiber link and compared with an Analog Radio over Fiber (ARoF) and Baseband over Fiber communication systems. Link´s performance is investigated in the presence of other channels interference and Mode-locked Laser Diode pulse trains with about overall 1 picoseconds timing jitter. Simulation results proved that the proposed All-Photonic DROF is a suitable candidate for very high sampling rate of the digital optical links and is more robust against channel interferences than Analog Radio over Fiber (ARoF).