Provision of IR-UWB wireless and baseband wired services over a WDM-PON

A simple scheme to simultaneously generate an on-off keying or bi-phase modulation (BPM) impulse radio ultra wideband (IR-UWB) signal and a baseband wired signal in the optical domain using a dual-drive modulator is proposed and demonstrated. Although the two signals have spectral overlap in the optical spectrum, they are located at different frequency bands when converted to electrical signals at a photodetector (PD), which can be well separated by an electrical filter. An experiment is carried out. Eye diagrams, electrical spectra and BER measurements show that the co-channel interference between the UWB and the wired signals is small for a single-channel 36-km fiber link to provide 1.25-Gb/s UWB wireless and 1.25-Gb/s baseband wired services. The inter-channel interference is also small and negligible when the link is operated together with two other 1.25 Gb/s baseband wired links, which demonstrates that a conventional WDM-PON can be upgraded to provide additional UWB services without affecting the existing services by modifying the modulators in the center office and inserting UWB antennas in the optical network units.