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

K. Prince, M. Presi, A. Chiuchiarelli, I. Cerutti, G. Contestabile, I.T. Monroy, E. Ciaramella
2009 Journal of Lightwave Technology  
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,
more » ... th 2 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. Index Terms-Beamforming, mobile communications, optical access networks, radio over fiber (RoF) networks, WiMAX.
doi:10.1109/jlt.2009.2026491 fatcat:42rdrl2dcvgf7lm3kz3zok3bv4