Wideband co-site interference cancellation based on hybrid electrical and optical techniques

A wideband co-site co-channel interference cancellation system (ICS), based on hybrid electrical and optical techniques, is proposed and is experimentally demonstrated. The demonstrated cancellation system subtracts the in-band wideband interfering signal from the received signal, such that the weak signal of interest (SOI) can be recovered. Our system utilizes a broadband radio frequency (RF) Balun transformer to invert the phase of the interfering signal, while electro-absorption modulated lasers are used for converting the RF signals into the optical domain to enable fine adjustment with the hybrid ICS. We experimentally achieve 45 dB of cancellation over a 220 MHz bandwidth, and over 57 dB of cancellation for a 10 MHz bandwidth, at a center frequency of 900 MHz. The proposed system also experimentally shows good cancellation (30 dB) over an enormously wide bandwidth of 5.5 GHz. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of such a wide bandwidth cancellation with good cancellation depth. This property is extremely useful when there are multiple interference signals at various frequency bands. The proposed hybrid ICS has a spurious-free dynamic range of 93.2  dBm/Hz(2/3). Moreover, a 10  Gb/s SOI is recovered from a strong interfering signal, sweeping over 3 GHz bandwidth. A widely open eye diagram, as well as error-free bit-error rate measurements, is experimentally achieved, with the use of the hybrid ICS. The approach also works well for various frequency bands that are within the bandwidth of the Balun transformer and electro-absorption modulated lasers.