A novel direct detection microwave photonic vector modulation scheme for radio-over-fiber system

This letter demonstrates the feasibility of a novel direct detection microwave photonic vector modulation scheme for the radio-over-fiber (RoF) system. Unlike the traditional double-sideband with optical carrier suppression modulation scheme, which can carry only the on-off keying data format, the proposed scheme encodes the electrical vector signal on either the upper sideband (USB) or the lower sideband (LSB) only and a pure optical subcarrier on the other sideband. Therefore, phase and amplitude information will be preserved after direct detection. A frequency doubling scheme is employed to reduce the cost of RoF systems. Additionally, the relative intensity between USB and LSB can be easily tuned by adjusting the individual power of electrical driving signals to optimize the performance of the optical radio-frequency signals. A proof-of-concept experiment is conducted by using a 1.25 Gb/s BPSK signal at a carrier frequency of 20 GHz. After transmission over 50-km single-mode fiber, the receiver sensitivity penalty is less than 0.5 dB.