Improvement of the transmission performance in multi-IF-over-fiber mobile fronthaul by using tone-reservation technique

Abstract

©2015 Optical Society of America. We demonstrate the improvement of the transmission performance based on tone-reservation technique in a multiple intermediatefrequency-over-fiber (IFoF) based mobile fronthaul. The tone-reservation technique can suppress nonlinear distortion by eliminating the high peak components of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signal. To prevent the regrowth of peak, we employ tone-reservation after multiplexing IF carriers. Furthermore, we use an out-of-band signal as the reserved tones to avoid any modification of a mobile signal. The impact of the number of IF carriers on peak-To-Average power ratio (PAPR) characteristics is presented via numerical simulation. For the multi-IFoF based mobile fronthaul, we experimentally investigate the transmission performance of 36-IF carriers of the long term evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) signals mapped with 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). It is clearly observed that the clipping-induced nonlinear distortion is dramatically suppressed by using tone-reservation. As a result, the transmission performance of 36-IF carriers of the LTE-A signal is improved by an error-vector-magnitude (EVM) of 4% (from 9.7% to 5.7%) after 20-km transmission.

Publication
Optics Express