Millimeter-Wave Fiber-Fed Wireless Access Systems Based on Dense Wavelength-Division-Multiplexing Networks

This paper describes new 60-GHz-band bidirectional fiber-fed wireless access systems, which provide simple antenna base-station architecture and full compatibility with dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) fiber-optic networks. For downlink millimeter-wave signal generation, the proposed scheme utilizes uplink optical transmitters as downlink optical heterodyne sources, which promises wavelength allocations of downlink and uplink signals that are fully compatible with those of DWDM networks. The frequency instability and poor phase-noise characteristics of these optically heterodyned signals do not affect transmission quality at all by using self-heterodyne wireless transmission techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides not only strong immunity to phase-noise degradation coming from both fiber and millimeter-wave links, but also less sensitivity to fiber transmission loss than conventional remote optical heterodyne approaches. With the help of these attractive features, we successfully demonstrate both downlink and uplink orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing data transmissions in both 10-km fiber-optic and 60-Hz links.