Experimental reduction of chromatic dispersion effects in electro-optical up-converted millimeter-wave fiber-optic links

Summary form only given. Summary form only given. The rapid deployment of point-to-multipoint millimeter-wave radio systems for video distribution has resulted in much interest in optimizing millimeter-wave antenna remoting photonic links operating near 1550 nm. In these systems the performance is severely limited by the chromatic dispersion of standard optical fiber, which drastically limits the frequency-length product of fiber-optic links. Optical techniques such as self-heterodyne schemes and chirped fiber gratings have been proposed to combat the chromatic dispersion effects in millimeter-wave optical transmissions. On the other hand, several electro-optical upconverting schemes based on a single Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZ-EOM) have been proposed to alleviate the use of wideband linearized distributed feedback (DFB) lasers and wideband electronic devices. In addition, different biasing types in the MZ-EOM have been considered such as quadrature biasing (QB) and minimum transmission biasing (MTB). Furthermore, the impact of the different types of MZ-EOM biasing on the chromatic dispersion effects has been recently outlined showing the feasibility of mitigating the dispersion effects by biasing the upconverting MZ-EOM at MTB. In this paper, we demonstrate experimentally the significant reduction of the dispersion-induced carrier suppression effect on the up-converted signal by employing MTB in the MZ-EOM-based photonic upconverter.