Microwave photonics for space-time compression of ultrabroadband signals through multipath wireless channels

We employed photonic radio frequency (RF) arbitrary waveform generation to demonstrate space-time compression of ultrabroadband wireless signals through highly scattering multipath channels. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental report that explores an RF-photonic transmitter to both characterize channel dispersions in real wireless environments and generate predistorted waveforms to achieve focusing through the multipath channels. Our experiments span a three octave frequency range of 2-18 GHz, nearly an order of magnitude beyond the ~2 GHz instantaneous bandwidth reported in previous spatiotemporal focusing experiments relying on electronic waveform generators.