Millimeter-wave signal transmission using digitized radio-over-fiber technique

In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a digitized millimeter-over-fiber transmission scheme using better-performance less-expensive digital optical link. A 40 GHz millimeter wave signal is successfully generated in BS from a digitized IF signal centered at 500 MHz with a sampling rate of 2 GHz, bit resolution of 5 and a total optical bit rate of 10 Gbps. A DAC with the same sampling rate and sufficient bandwidth is employed in the BS to reconstruct the signal in analog domain and generate high frequency images of the original signal. By using a bandpass filter we abstract its 7th order image at 7.5 GHz. A 10 GHz clock signal recovered from the digitized IF signal is 4-time multiplied, and mixed with the 7.5 GHz signal for millimeter wave signal generation.