Photonic remote microwave frequency measurement with a tunable measurement range based on dispersion compensation technology

In this paper, a novel and efficient photonic-assisted remote frequency measurement (RFM) system with a significantly simplified structure and flexible operation range is proposed. In this system, the remote antenna unit (RAU) and the the central station (CS) are separated to ensure the concealment and safety of the signal processing unit. At the RAU, the unknown radio frequency (RF) signal is modulated by a dual-polarization dual-drive Mach–Zehnder modulator (DPol-DMZM). In the CS, changing the dispersion coefficient or length of the dispersion medium, the microwave frequency measurement range of the RFM system can be easily tuned without system reconstruction, and different RAUs located at different places can be controlled to work at the same measurement range. The simulation results show that a frequency measurement over the high frequency range (> 18 GHz) can be achieved with a measurement error better than ± 0.2 GHz. Noteworthy, the impact of the non-ideal factors such as bias drift, intensity noise, phase noise, the equivalent deviation of the polarization beam splitter (PBS), and the dispersion value of the single mode fiber (SMF) are also discussed. It has been proved that they have little influence on the system performance over the high frequency range.