I. Introduction
Millimeter-Wave (mm-wave) fiber-radio systems are being considered as a potential candidate for the distribution of future broad-band wireless access (BWA) services. In these systems multiple remote antenna base stations (BSs), suitable for untethered connectivity for BWA applications, can be directly serviced by a central office (CO) via an optical fiber feeder network [1]. The excessive propagation loss at such high radio frequencies however, shrinks the radio coverage of the BSs to micro- and pico-cells, which brings forth the need for a large number of antenna BSs to cover a certain geographical area. The use of wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) in such fiber distribution systems can improve the capacity of these systems by increasing the number of BSs serviced via a single CO [2]. The introduction of wavelength interleaving (WI) also enables these systems to support a dense-WDM (DWDM) feeder network that can further increase the number of BSs serviced through a single CO [3]. A demultiplexing scheme for 25-GHz separated DWDM mm-wave fiber-radio channels was proposed in [4], which requires additional preprocessing and postprocessing devices. An alternative approach is the introduction of a multifunctional WDM optical interface, which effectively adds and drops the desired channels to and from the wavelength-interleaved-DWDM (WI-DWDM) feeder network, in addition to enabling a wavelength reuse technique at the BSs [5]. The successful deployment of such systems supporting a WI-DWDM feeder network however, is largely dependent on suitable and efficient multiplexing schemes.