Copyright © 2014 by IEICE
Bandpass Sampling in Digital Coherent Receiver with
Free-Running Local Oscillator Laser for Phase
Modulated Radio-over-Fiber Systems
Minghua Cao, Jianqiang Li, Kun Xu*, Yitang Dai, Feifei Yin and Jintong Lin
State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications, Beijing University of Posts and
Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, P. R. China
Email: xukun@bupt.edu.cn
Abstract—We have experimentally presented a novel
radio-over-fiber (RoF) based digital receiver architecture for
coherent heterodyne detection. It demonstrates the application of
using bandpass sampling in a RoF communications system to
overcome the high sampling rate requirement of conventional
receivers and front-end hardware dependency. In particular, we
modified the uniform bandpass sampling theorem to cope with
frequency offset produced by independent free running optical
local oscillator. Thereafter, a 40Mbit/s QPSK modulated data
signal at 2.4GHz RF carrier frequency is experimentally
demonstrated by using phase modulated and digital signal
processing aided RoF links.
Keywords—Radio-over-Fiber; Bandpass Sampling; Coherent
Communications
I. INTRODUCTION
Resent large-scale deployment of broadband wireless
access networks such as WiFi, WiMAX, 3G and LTE/4G
demand high-bit-rate, power-efficient and cost-effective
solutions for high performance fronthaul links over sufficiently
long distances. The use of RoF for the linear transport of radio
frequency (RF) is considered as a flexible approach for
reducing system complexity by using a centralized architecture
that incorporates a simplified antenna located closer to the
customer[1-3].
Most approaches utilized in RoF links employed intensity
modulation with direct detection (IM-DD), which are
inherently non-linear and result in limited dynamic range for
uplink. An alternative approach to IM-DD link is to use optical
phase modulation at the antenna and linear coherent detection
(PM-Coh) at the central unit. Such a phase modulator allows an
electrical signal to vary the phase angle of an optical carrier
with inherent linearity and does not require bias control. In
addition, coherent receiver techniques offer improved receiver
sensitivity by using high-power optical local oscillator (LO)
and higher modulation depths [4, 5].
Fig.1 Direct sampling and digital coherent detection
The general architecture of DSP aided PM-Coh receiver of
interest here represented in Fig.1. This design eliminates the
requirement of using analog mixers for frequency
down-conversion. In addition, by incorporating PM-Coh
technology there remains enough room for enhancing the
performance of RoF transmission systems [6].
In digital signal processing (DSP) aided coherent RoF
receiver, the signal is first down-converted from the optical
carrier to the modulated electrical carrier. The electrical RF
signal is then sampled by ADCs for further down-conversion to
the baseband and subsequent demodulation operations carried
out by DSPs. In practice, when RF carrier working at GHz
frequency band, the required sampling rate for ADCs can be
too high to be achieved if the Nyquist sampling theorem is to
be satisfied [7, 8]. Moreover, it would be a waste to process at
this rate for information only appeared within a relatively
narrow band. Therefore, we propose to employ bandpass
sampling [9] which is a technique that samples high data rate
signals with smaller sampling rate to relax the demand for
ADCs and DSPs. As a result, the amount of memory needed to
capture a given time interval of a continuous signal can be
reduced, thereby decreasing overall computational complexity.
Moreover, bandpass sampling can realize direct frequency
downconversion which can simplify the architecture of the
base stations by eliminating analog mixing devices required.
Unfortunately, in an optical coherent receiver with free
running optical LO, it is well known that frequency offset is
present [10], which complicates bandpass sampling design. In
this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a
complete bandpass-sampling-based digital coherent receiver
with free-running LO laser for cost-efficient PM-Coh RoF
links.
II. P
RACTICAL CONSIDERATION OF APPROPRIATE
SAMPLING RATES
Fig.2 Spectral replications in frequency domain from bandpass sampling
of (a)a bandpass signal, (b)aliasing-free sampling, (c)local oscillator
frequency offset caused aliasing
Due to the current lack of inexpensive high speed ADCs
and DSPs, bandpass sampling is an attractive option for
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