Effect of erbium-doped fiber amplifier loss compensation on 5G new radio millimeter-wave seamless transmission over analog fiber and free space optical fronthaul at 60 GHz

We demonstrate a fifth generation (5G) new radio (NR) signal transmitted by an analog optical and seamless antenna wireless connection at the frequency band of 60 GHz to exploit a high-frequency unlicensed frequency range. An optical frequency doubling technique, using two Mach-Zehnder modulators operating in a carrier suppressed and linear regime, respectively, was adopted to obtain the desired millimeter wave frequency at the photodetector's output. The proposed system was tested with the 5G NR signals with a maximum bandwidth of 200 MHz and 64 quadrature amplitude modulation format. It was shown that the signal transmitted through the optical fiber and free space optical link with 1 m long seamless antenna transmission at 62 GHz was capable of meeting the signal quality requirements in terms of error vector magnitude. Moreover, the system phase noise performance showed an almost negligible difference between the various system configurations. (C) 2022 Society of Photo Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)