Digitizing radio-over-fiber transceiver based on optical tunable encoder and optical codewords

Radio over fiber (RoF) is a very attractive and promising technology for wireless access networks, because of several advantages such as providing huge bandwidth, inherent immunity to electromagnetic interference and reduced power consumption. The analog RoF networks cannot be used for the transmission of radio signals over long lengths of fiber due to the distortions induced by dispersion and nonlinearity of the optical link. The digitized RoF communication presents an interesting alternative to circumvent the limitations of ARoF networks. In this paper, we propose an all-optical DRoF (Digital RoF) scheme based on the optical encoding technique and optical codewords instead of modulation techniques. The proposed scheme is composed of an all-optical sampler, an all-optical thresholder and an all-optical encoder. The proposed all-optical DRoF design is simulated by implementing its three main components using the simulation platform, Optisystem. We have also studied the capacity of the proposed encoding architecture in terms of the maximum number of chips that can be supported. Furthermore, ARoF, DRoF and the proposed all-optical DRoF systems are compared based on the minimum bit error rate, the maximum quality factor, and the complexity and implementation cost.