Performance evaluation of a 60-GHz RoF-OFDM system for wireless applications

Abstract

Radio over fiber (RoF) is an emerging and promising communication technology based on combining wireless and fiber-optic communications, where light is modulated with radio frequency signals and transmitted over the optical fiber. This paper proposes a modified RoF communication system based on the incorporation of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique into RoF system, called RoF-OFDM. We focus on the transmission of OFDM signals at the frequency of 60 GHz. The performance of the proposed RoF-OFDM system is evaluated in terms of bit error rate (BER) and the constellation diagrams. For this purpose, we use three different formats of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) such as 16-QAM, 64-QAM, and 256-QAM, and various values of data rate, Optical Signal-to-Noise Ratio (OSNR), input optical power, and fiber length. Simulation results show that RoF-OFDM system using 16-QAM gives good results in terms of fiber length and OSNR. However, the best performance using 64-QAM is obtained in the case of optical power. In addition, in terms of bit rate, 16-QAM outperforms both 64-QAM and 256-QAM formats for a bit rate lower than 17 Gbit/s. Otherwise, the best performance is given with 64-QAM