RF pilot tone phase noise cancellation based on DD-MZM SSB modulation for optical heterodyne RoF link

The optical heterodyne radio over fiber (RoF) link using single-sideband (SSB) modulation has advantage in system scalability, tunability, as well as resistance to chromatic dispersion induced frequency selective fading. However, the phase noise which seriously degrades system performance, is a major obstacle to employ low-cost free-running lasers in the aforementioned link. In this paper, the RF pilot tone (RFP) phase noise cancellation (PNC) based on dual drive Mach-Zehnder modulator SSB modulation for optical heterodyne RoF link is investigated and demonstrated. Two kinds of RFP PNC schemes, carrier whole multiplication (CWM) and carrier signal multiplication (CSM), are both derived theoretically and verified experimentally. The impacts of carrier signal power ratio, carrier filter bandwidth and guard band on system performance are studied in detail. The results show that, the RFP-CSM scheme can improve the spectral efficiency by 62.5% and receiver sensitivity of 1.2 dB for 1.25 Gbps quadrature phase shift keying signal at a BER of 3.8 x10(-3), as compared with the RFP-CWM scheme and power detection scheme, mainly attributed to the absence of the second-order nonlinear intermodulation distortion. Furthermore, the RFP-CSM scheme demonstrates good phase noise robustness with different high-order modulation formats under two kinds of linewidth local oscillator lasers.