W-band OFDM photonic vector signal generation employing a single Mach-Zehnder modulator and precoding

We present a simple radio-over-fiber (RoF) link architecture for millimeter-wave orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission using only one Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) and precoding technique. In the transmission system, the amplitudes and the phase of the driving radio-frequency (RF) OFDM signal on each sub-carrier are precoded, to ensure that the OFDM signal after photodetector (PD) can be restored to original OFDM signal. The experimental results show that the bit-error ratios (BERs) of the transmission system are less than the forward-error-correction (FEC) threshold of 3.8 × 10(-3), which demonstrates that the generation of OFDM vector signal based on our proposed scheme can be employed in our system architecture.