Optoelectronic multiplexing of microwave sub-carriers for high-speed wireless transmissions

In the rf domain, multiplexed transmission of microwave subcarriers is implemented by associating microwave oscillators, mixers and rf filters in order to accommodate and isolate the modulated subcarriers before being transmitted by different media as metallic and optical cables, earth atmosphere or free space. To avoid mutual interference and spectral overlapping of the multiplexed subcarriers, rf filters should present sharp band-pass responses. in an alternative approach, an optoelectronic multiplexing scheme for grouping high-data rate modulated microwave subcarriers is reported in this paper. This scheme avoids the use of microwave filters and the multiplexing scheme is based on the sharps band-pass microwave filtering response of a multimode laser associated to a length of dispersive standard single mode optical fiber. The multiplexing of 2, 100mbps data-modulated microwave subcarriers between 5 to 9 GHz (UWB frequency range) is described in this work.