Loop-Back Optical Heterodyne Technique for 1.0-Gb/s Data Transmission Over 60-GHz Radio-On-Fiber Uplink

An optical-heterodyne-detection method for a 60-GHz radio-on-fiber uplink is proposed and verified in this paper. The main point of this proposal is that all the functions needed for the optical heterodyne detection, i.e., the local/carrier light sources, the automatic frequency control of these light sources, and a polarization-diversity-detection circuit, are consolidated in one transmitting-side module to realize a simple system configuration. This proposal realizes an adequate optical uplink budget with low-cost optical receivers that consist of just one IF-band photodetector and one envelope detector. A 1.0-Gb/s transmission experiment over 10 km of single-mode fiber, which represents access-network transmission, is demonstrated using a 61.0-GHz amplitude-shift-keying signal as a 60 GHz-band uplink signal. A BER of less than 10-9 was obtained at an uplink SSB signal power of -40 dBm regardless of the polarization state of the optical uplink signal, and no significant dispersion-induced degradation was noted.