Orthogonal Chirp-Division Multiplexing for Future Converged Optical/Millimeter-Wave Radio Access Networks

Envisaged network scaling in the beyond 5G and 6G era makes the optical transport of high bandwidth radio signals a critical aspect for future radio access networks (RANs), while the move toward wireless transmission in millimeter-wave (mm-wave) and terahertz (THz) environments is pushing a departure from the currently deployed orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation scheme. In this work, the orthogonal chirp-division multiplexing (OCDM) waveform is experimentally deployed in a converged optical/mm-wave transmission system comprising 10 km analog radio-over-fiber (A-RoF) transmission, remote mm-wave generation and 2 m wireless transmission at 60 GHz. System performance is evaluated in terms of both bit error ratio (BER) and error vector magnitude (EVM) for a wideband 4 GHz 16 Gb/s signal and 128/256-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) mobile signals compatible with 5G new radio numerology. OCDM is shown to outperform OFDM by offering enhanced robustness to channel frequency selectivity, enabling performances below the forward error correction (FEC) limit in all cases and exhibiting an EVM as low as 3.4% in the case of the mobile signal transmission.

*Published in the IEEE Photonics Society Section within IEEE Access.

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A Cost-Effective 2-Channel OTDM System Implemented With Sinusoidally Modulated Light Source

We propose to implement a 2-channel optical-time-division-multiplexed (OTDM) system for short-reach optical interconnects by using a sinusoidally modulated light source instead of a complicated mode-locked laser as an input pulse source. In this system, the OTDM signal is obtained by bit-interleaving two optical return-to-zero (RZ) signals generated by using the sinusoidally modulated light. We operate these RZ signals in the orthogonal in-phase and quadrature domains to avoid the unwanted beat components. After the transmission, the OTDM signal is detected by using single photodetector, and then processed by a 2 × 2 multiple-input multiple-output equalizer. For a demonstration, we generate 150-Gb/s OTDM signal operating in the 8-level pulse-amplitude modulated (PAM-8) format by using commercial LiNbO 3 Mach-Zehnder modulators and transmit this OTDM signal over 1.9 km of the standard single-mode fiber (SSMF). In addition, we fabricate the proposed OTDM transmitter in an integrated silicon-photonics chip and use it to demonstrate the transmission of the 64-Gb/s OTDM PAM-4 signal over 2.2 km of SSMF.

Published in the IEEE Photonics Society Section within IEEE Access.

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Most Cited Article of 2017: Index Modulation Techniques for Next-Generation Wireless Networks

What is index modulation (IM)? This is an interesting question that we have started to hear more and more frequently over the past few years. The aim of this paper is to answer this question in a comprehensive manner by covering not only the basic principles and emerging variants of IM, but also reviewing the most recent as well as promising advances in this field toward the application scenarios foreseen in next-generation wireless networks. More specifically, we investigate three forms of IM: spatial modulation, channel modulation and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with IM, which consider the transmit antennas of a multiple-input multiple-output system, the radio frequency mirrors (parasitic elements) mounted at a transmit antenna and the subcarriers of an OFDM system for IM techniques, respectively. We present the up-to-date advances in these three promising frontiers and discuss possible future research directions for IM-based schemes toward low-complexity, spectrum- and energy-efficient next-generation wireless networks.

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