Abstract
A reconfigurable optical-to-electrical signal aggregation is proposed, for the first time, using optical signal processing and photo-mixing technology. Two optically modulated quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) signals are aggregated into a single 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) signal and, simultaneously, carried over a 28-GHz millimeter wave (MMW) carrier using an optimized heterodyne beating process through a single photodiode. To demonstrate the system reconfigurability, aggregation of two optical binary phase-shift keying signals is mapped into MMW QPSK or four-level pulse amplitude modulation signals by controlling the relative phases and amplitudes, respectively, of the input signals. In addition, the aggregation of two 16-QAM signals into a 256-QAM signal and the aggregation of three QPSK signals into a 64-QAM format are achieved. Besides, we report the effect of laser phase noise on signal aggregation performance. The de-aggregation of the aggregated MMW signals is performed electrically using a successive interference cancellation algorithm. Moreover, a proof-of-concept experiment is conducted to validate the numerical simulations. Two 1-Gbaud BPSK (1 Gbps) and QPSK (2 Gbps) optical signals are optically transmitted over a 20-km single-mode fiber as MMW over fiber signals. Then, the signals are aggregated into QPSK (2 Gbps) and 16-QAM (4 Gbps) 28-GHz MMW signals, respectively. The aggregated signal is further transmitted over a 1-m wireless channel. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated using bit error rate and error vector magnitude metrics. (C) 2022 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement