Variable Delay With Directly-Modulated R-SOA and Optical Filters for Adaptive Antenna Radio-Fiber Access

We present an all-optical adaptive-antenna radio over fiber transport system that uses proven, commercially-available components to effectively deliver standard-compliant optical signaling to adaptive multiantenna arrays for current and emerging radio technology implementations. The system is based on a directly-modulated reflective semiconductor amplifier (R-SOA) and exploits the interplay between transmission-line dispersion and tunable optical filtering to achieve flexible true time delay, with 2pi beam steering at the different antennas. The system was characterized, then successfully tested with two types of signals defined in IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) standard for wireless networks: a 90 Mbps single-carrier signal (64-QAM at 2.4 GHz) and a 78 Mbps multitone orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) signal. The power budget of this configuration supports a 4-element antenna array.