Experimental evaluation of a digitized fiber-wireless system employing sigma delta modulation

Digitized radio-over-fiber (D-RoF) transport schemes are being pointed as viable alternative solutions to their analog counterparts, in order to avoid distortion/dynamic range problems. Here we propose a novel D-RoF architecture that takes advantage of a bandpass sigma-delta modulator at the transmitter which subsequently permits the usage of a simpler/cheaper base station that avoids the employment of a digital to analog converter. The proposed architecture exploits the properties of the digital signal to enable the extraction of an higher carrier frequency through the employment of a bandpass filter. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive analysis regarding the impact of a low-cost electro-optic modulation on the quality of received demodulated signal. Finally, a comparison performance analysis between the conventional D-RoF and the proposed architecture is presented. We conclude that although the proposed architecture performs similarly to conventional D-RoF schemes, it is more competitive for either upgrading installed systems as well as for new deployments.