Experimental characterization of the radio over fiber aided twin-antenna spatial modulation downlink

In this paper, we present the design and the experimental demonstration of a radio over fiber (RoF) network relying on state-of-the-art spatial modulation (SM), that activates one out of multiple antennas. We propose a novel RoF-aided SM encoding scheme, where the optical single side-band signal generated by a Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) is used for both the antenna selection and for the classic modulated symbol selection. The SM encoding is optically processed in a centralized fashion, aiming for the reduction of power consumption and for enabling cost-effective maintenance and management, which can be employed in the context of a cloud radio access network (C-RAN) and a small-cell front-haul. Furthermore, an experimental demonstration of the proposed system is discussed and analyzed, where a 20 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) is used for transmission. In this experiment, a 2 Gbps transmission relying on two transmit and two receive antennas is achieved with less than 1 dB SNR degradation compared to those operating without RoF.