Impact of interferometric noise on the remote delivery of optically generated millimeter-wave signals

In this paper, we report for the first time results relating to reflections/multipath induced interferometric noise in millimeter-wave fiber-radio systems for the broadcast of very narrow linewidth wave signals. We use a rigorous formulation based on the modified Chernoff bound which provides an accurate upper bound on the bit-error rate (BER) and power penalty (PP). Simulated results show good agreement with the analytical findings. We conclude that interferometric noise (IN) can be a significant impairment in systems of this type.