Bandwidth Compressed Waveform for 60-GHz Millimeter-Wave Radio Over Fiber Experiment

A bandwidth compressed waveform termed spectrally efficient frequency division multiplexing (SEFDM) is experimentally demonstrated in a 60-GHz millimeter-wave (mm-wave) radio-over-fiber scenario to increase transmission data rates without changing signal bandwidth and modulation format. Experimental results show the advantages of SEFDM and confirm that the bit rate of SEFDM signals can be substantially higher than that of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signals. Experimentally, a 2.25 Gbit/s 4QAM OFDM signal is transmitted through 250 m of OM-1 multi-mode fiber and then it is optically up converted to 60 GHz band at the photodiode before delivery to a mm-wave antenna for transmission over a 3 meter wireless link. The work demonstrates that when the OFDM signal is replaced by an SEFDM signal using the same modulation format and occupying the same bandwidth, the bit rate can be increased, by a factor of up to 67%, to 3.75 Gbit/s at the expense of a 3-dB power penalty. Additionally, a bandwidth compressed 4QAM SEFDM is shown to outperform an 8QAM OFDM of the same spectral efficiency, thereby verifying that a lower order modulation format may replace a higher order one and achieve performance gain.