Stimulated Brillouin scattering for efficient improvement of radio-over-fiber systems

A simple and efficient technique based on stimulated Brillouin scattering is proposed to reduce RF loss in radio-over-fiber systems. The modulation depth and RF signal gain increase with the power of the input modulated signal. A modulation depth of 100% can be easily attained at a lower input power. The experimental results are in good agreement with the theoretical predictions. Approximately 26 dB of RF signal gain in the band from 1 to 18 GHz is achieved in the experiment with this technique. Finally, the transmission experiment shows that this technique can effectively improve the performance of radio-over-fiber systems. (c) 2005 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.