Experimental Investigation on

Fiber-Wireless MIMO System With

Different LO at W Band
Volume 7, Number 2, April 2015
Yuming Xu
Jianjun Yu
Xinying Li
Jiangnan Xiao
Ziran Zhang

DOI: 10.1109/JPHOT.2015.2411230
1943-0655 2015 IEEE

IEEE Photonics Journal

Investigation on Fiber-Wireless MIMO System

Experimental Investigation on
Fiber-Wireless MIMO System With
Different LO at W Band
Yuming Xu,1 Jianjun Yu,1,2 Xinying Li,1 Jiangnan Xiao,1 and Ziran Zhang1
1

Key Laboratory for Information Science of Electromagnetic Waves, Fudan University,

Shanghai 200433, China
2
ZTE TX Inc., Morristown, NJ 07960 USA

DOI: 10.1109/JPHOT.2015.2411230
1943-0655 2015 IEEE. Translations and content mining are permitted for academic research only.
Personal use is also permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.

Manuscript received February 2, 2015; accepted March 2, 2015. Date of current version
March 19, 2015. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of
China under Grant 61325002 and Grant 61250018 and in part by the Key Program of Shanghai Science and Technology Association under Grant 13JC1400700. Corresponding author: Y. Xu (e-mail:
13110720072@fudan.edu.cn).

Abstract: We experimentally demonstrate an optical-wireless transmission system at

W band, which can support long-distance wireless transmission and tolerate some frequency difference of the local oscillators (LOs) at the receiver. The generation of millimeterwave signal is based on the photonic technique by heterodyne mixing of an optical
polarization division multiplexing quadrature phase shift keying (PDM-QPSK) signal and an
optical LO signal. After 20-km fiber transmission, tens of gigabit-per-second millimeter-wave
signals are delivered over multiple-inputmultiple-output (MIMO) wireless links by different
polarization antennas. Then, analog downconversion is performed before the received signal is demodulated by coherent detection and advanced digital signal processing. Using this
system, we experimentally demonstrate the transmission of 18.7-, 29.9-, and 37.4-Gb/s
PDM-QPSK wireless signals at W band over 80-, 40-, and 20-m wireless links, respectively,
with bit error rate less than the forward error correction threshold of 3:8
103 . In addition,
we investigate the effect of different frequency LOs on the MIMO system performance, finding that the system can tolerate about 1.25-GHz frequency difference for a 10-Gbaud signal.
The proposed system can be suitable for the building-to-building broadband connection, inbuilding hybrid fiber-wireless access networks, and some scenarios that bridge natural obstacles and difficult-to-access terrain.
Index Terms: Optical-wireless, W band, polarization division multiplexing quadrature phase
shift keying (PDM-QPSK), frequency difference, digital signal processing (DSP).

1. Introduction
With the ever-increasing demands for deliver of high-data-rate services such as transmitting
more than 20 Gb/s super-high-definition (SHD) and 40 Gb/s OC-768/STM-256 data flow, millimeterwave (mm-wave) support higher bandwidth than microwave and have good prospects. Among
mm-wave bands, W band (75110 GHz) with high bandwidth and less than 0.5 dB/km atmospheric
loss [1] is very suitable for high capacity wireless transmission over long distance. Because of the
constraint of electrical component bandwidth, photonic mm-wave technique is adopted to generate
the W band signal, which further promotes the seamless integration of wireless and fiber-optic
networks [2][7].

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Investigation on Fiber-Wireless MIMO System

Fig. 1. Schematic of building-to-building broadband connection.

As discussed in previous reports, W band optical-wireless integration systems can be applied

to the disaster emergency service and last-mile access networks [8], [9]. However, there are
several issues existing in current systems. On the one hand, for doubling the capacity of an opticalwireless link, polarization division multiplexing (PDM) associated with multiple-inputmultipleoutput (MIMO) technologies is a practical solution for the future spectrally efficient high-speed
transmission. In this case, two parallel mixers are needed for down converting the W band signal
to an intermediate-frequency (IF) or baseband signal, but the local oscillator (LO) for the two parallel mixers is the same in previous demonstrations [10][15]. In the real system, each receiver has
its individual LO for signal down-conversion, and thus the frequency of each LO may be different.
In fact, considering practical deployment, solid-state mm-wave signal sources are often adopted
as LO due to their small size and low cost. The solid-state signal sources that produce mm-wave
signal are mainly based on the impedance nonlinearity of some diodes, such as GaAs Schottky diode frequency multipliers, as well as the negative resistance properties of some diodes, such as
Gunn-diode harmonic frequency oscillators and IMPATT oscillators [16]. However, compared with
the large size and expensive high-precise millimeter waves sources which tend to be used in measurement [17], the accuracy of most of solid-state mm-wave signal sources are lower, within the
range of several MHz and even several tens of MHz. In addition, the temperature drift of such
mm-wave source is high [18], which can result in tens of MHz and even hundreds of MHz frequency difference of the two LOs in some application scenarios with large temperature difference.
For example, one receiver is indoor, and the other receiver is outdoor when it snows in winter. So
it is necessary to investigate how much the frequency deviation of LOs can be tolerated in
W-band optical-wireless system. To the best of our knowledge, no investigation has focused on it
before. On the other hand, the wireless transmission distance is short in previous demonstrations
[10][15]. Regarding achieved air transmission distances for bit-rates above 20 Gb/s in the
W-band, so far 2 m for 432 Gb/s polarization-division-multiplexing 16-ary quadrature-amplitudemodulation (PDM-16QAM) 4
4 MIMO transmission [14] and 2.3 m for 74.4 Gb/s dual-polarization
quadrature-phase-shift-keying (QPSK) 2
2 MIMO transmission were reported [15]. Only several
meters of wireless transmission distance would be difficult to meet the demand for the future lastmile access networks and disaster emergency communications. But once the wireless transmission
distance extends to several tens of meters and even hundreds of meters, the system that supports
the ability can be applied to fixed wireless broadband access such as building to building broadband connection as shown in Fig. 1, in-building hybrid fiber-wireless access networks [9], and
some scenarios that bridge natural obstacles and difficult-to-access terrain like rivers, valleys,
and so on. In most of these scenarios, the remote antenna units (RAUs) should meet the key requirements of being simple, compact, and low-cost.
In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate an optical-wireless integration MIMO system at
W band enabled by photonic generation, polarization multiplexing and different LOs for analog
down conversion. The systems can support 18.7, 29.9, and 37.4 Gb/s PDM-QPSK signal wireless transmission over 80, 40, and 20 m, respectively. Meanwhile, we investigate the different
frequency LO effect in the MIMO system, and find that the maximum tolerable frequency

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Investigation on Fiber-Wireless MIMO System

Fig. 2. Principle of the PDM-QPSK modulated optical wireless transmission system at W-band.

difference is about 1.25 GHz for a 10 Gbaud signal. For easy installation and reduction of
the required constant modulus algorithm (CMA) equalization tap number, horizontal polarization (H-polarization) and vertical-polarization (V-polarization) horn antennas (HAs) are simultaneously adopted in the wireless link. For such 100 m wireless transmission used HAs at W
band, we believe that the proposed system can be used in building to building broadband connection and the aforementioned other application scenarios.

2. Principle of System
The principle of the PDM-QPSK modulated optical wireless MIMO transmission system at
W-band is shown in Fig. 2. At the transmitter, X- and Y-polarization optical mm-wave PDMQPSK signals are generated by heterodyne beating. Then, the two optical mm-wave signals are
converted into two electrical mm-wave signals at 87 GHz by optical-to-electrical (O/E) conversion. After that, the two mm-wave signals at W band are delivered by two orthogonal polarization
antennas, respectively. Here, the isolation between H- and V-polarization antennas is 33 dB,
and the crosstalk between them is small enough to be negligible [4]. Therefore, the antenna
polarization diversity is adopted for easily adjusting direction of the antennas and effectively
doubling the transmission capacity. In addition, the adoption of antenna polarization diversity
can also reduce the required CMA tap number and the calculation time [4], [13]. At the receiver, the received W-band signals on the X- and Y-polarization branches are independently
downconverted into IF signals by mixing with two different frequency LOs in parallel, and then
the two IF signals are analog-to-digital converted by analog-to-digital converter (ADC). Finally,
the digital signals are recovered by advanced digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms.

3. Experimental Setup
Fig. 3 shows the experimental setup for the seamless integration of PDM-QPSK signal transmission over 20 km single-mode fiber-28 (SMF-28) and a span of MIMO wireless link at W band.
We finished this field demonstration in Handan Campus at Fudan University on a sunny day.
There is only a line-of-sight path between the transmitter and the receiver.
The laser sources adopted in Fig. 3 are free-running C-band external cavity lasers (ECLs)
with line-width less than 100 kHz and output power of 14.5 dBm. At the optical baseband transmitter, the continuous wave (CW) lightwave from an ECL at 1 1548:944 nm is externally
modulated by a 510 Gbaud electrical binary signal using an in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) modulator with 32 GHz 3 dB bandwidth and 7.5 dB insertion loss. The electrical binary signal has a
pseudo-random binary sequence (PRBS) length of 215  1 and is generated from a pulse pattern generator (PPG). Then the modulated optical QPSK signal is amplified by a polarizationmaintaining erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) with 23 dBm saturation output power and 5 dB
noise figure. For the following polarization diversity aiming at doubling the capacity of the opticalwireless link, the signal is first polarization multiplexed by a polarization multiplexer (PM). The
generated PDM-QPSK optical baseband signal is launched into 20-km SMF-28, which has 18 dB
average loss and 17 ps/km/nm chromatic dispersion (CD) at 1550 nm, without optical dispersion
compensation. The power launched into fiber is 5.4 dBm.

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Fig. 3. Experimental setup for the PDM-QPSK modulated seamlessly-integrated optical wireless
link at W-band. (a) Frequency response of EA1. (b) Frequency response of EA2.

At the optical heterodyne up-converter, two polarization beam splitters (PBSs) are used to implement polarization diversity of the received optical signal and LO in optical domain. The LO is
an ECL at 2 1548:248 nm. After that, the diversity signal and LO are heterodyne beat
through two optical couplers (OCs), enabling the produced mm-wave at a frequency of fRF
cj1=1  1=2 j 87 GHz (c is the velocity of light). Then, two single-ended photo detectors
(PDs), each with 90-GHz 3-dB bandwidth and 4-dBm input power, directly up-convert the PDMQPSK modulated optical baseband signal into the PDM-QPSK modulated mm-wave signal at
87 GHz. The generated mm-wave signal is amplified by two parallel W band electrical amplifiers
(both denoted by EA1) with 25-dB gain, 8-dBm saturation output power and 5-dB noise figure.
Fig. 3(a) shows the frequency response of EA1. Then, the signal is delivered over a span of
MIMO wireless link by H-polarization and V-polarization HAs each with 25-dBi gain and 10 degree half-power-beamwidth. The aperture size of the W band HA is 2.6 cm
2 cm. The wireless
transmission distance is variable from 10 to 80 m. Because the HA has relative large half-powerbeamwidth, it is easy to align the antenna after transmission over 10 m or longer distance. The
maximal signal which is shown in the real time oscilloscope (OSC) is obtained by adjusting the
antenna direction. The X- and Y-polarization wireless links are parallel, and two transmitter
(receiver) HAs have 1-m separation.
At the W band receiver, the received mm-wave signal is amplified by two parallel W band
electrical amplifiers (both denoted by EA2) with 35-dB gain, 2-dBm saturation output power, and
4.5-dB noise figure. Fig. 3(b) shows the frequency response of EA2. Then, analog down conversion is performed. For the X-polarization branch, a sinusoidal RF signal with fixed frequency of
74.6 GHz is mixed with the X-polarization signal to generate the IF signal at fIF 12:4 GHz. For
the Y-polarization branch, a 12.5-GHz tunable sinusoidal RF signal firstly passes through an
active frequency doubler (
2) and then a passive frequency tripler (
3). As a result of this cascaded frequency doubling, an equivalent 75-GHz tunable RF signal is provided for the corresponding balanced mixer and a 12-GHz IF signal is obtained after analog down conversion.
The two parallel mixers have the same characteristic of 7 dB conversion loss and 30 GHz bandwidth. Then, the IF signal is amplified by two parallel broadband electrical amplifiers (both denoted by EA3) with 35-dB gain, 22-dBm saturation output power and 40-GHz bandwidth.
Finally, the obtained signals are sampled by a digital storage OSC with 50-GSa/s sampling rate
and 16-GHz electrical bandwidth, and offline processed by advanced DSP, which includes time
recovery, CD compensation, CMA equalization, carrier recovery, differential decoding and bit-errorratio (BER) calculation [19]. The carrier recovery includes frequency offset estimation (FOE) and
carrier phase estimation (CPE). Fig. 4(a) shows the optical spectrum (0.01-nm resolution) after heterodyne beating. 87-GHz frequency spacing exists between the signal and the LO. Fig. 4(b) shows

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Investigation on Fiber-Wireless MIMO System

Fig. 4. (a) Optical spectrum after heterodyne beating. (b) Electrical spectrum after analog down
conversion.

Fig. 5. Constellations of 5 Gbaud Y-polarization QPSK signal after each step of off-line DSP:
(a) before clock extraction, (b) after clock extraction, (c) after CMA equalization, (d) after FOE, and
(e) after CPE.

the electrical spectrum of 10 Gbaud PDM-QPSK signal wireless delivery over 10 m after analog
down conversion.

4. Results and Discussion

Fig. 5(a)(e) respectively show the received 5 Gbaud Y-polarization QPSK signal constellations
after each step of off-line DSP for wireless transmission over 10 m. After CMA equalization, all
the signal constellations have converged to a ring. After FOE, the constellations of QPSK signal
are divided into four quadrants. As a result, the 5 Gbaud Y-polarization QPSK signal can be recovered after CPE. For X-polarization QPSK signal, the experimental results are quite similar
with those of Y-polarization.
Fig. 6(a)(d) show the PDM-QPSK signal constellations at different baud rates and different
wireless transmission distances. Clear QPSK symbol separation is observed for 8 Gaud signal
after 10 m transmission, with BER of 5
105 . As the wireless transmission distance increases,
the scattered degree of signal constellation points increases due to increased wireless path
loss, which results in the reduction of received power and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Besides,
the 10 Gbaud signal is not well converged to four constellation points and some big scattered
points result in the degradation of BER performance. This is mainly because the bandwidth of
ADC in the OSC is limited and the symbol information is not fully captured.
For application to an access network, the achievable distance is very important. Fig. 7 further
shows the measured BER versus wireless transmission distance for 5, 8, and 10 Gbaud PDMQPSK signals, respectively. The increased wireless distance and transmission rate results in
the degradation of BER performance. It is almost consistent with what Fig. 6 shows. For 5, 8,
and 10 Gbaud PDM-QPSK signals, the maximum transmission distance is at least 80, 40, and
20 m, respectively, before the BER reaches to the FEC limitation of 3:8
103 . The 5, 8, and
10 Gbaud baud rates correspond to total bit rates of 20, 32, and 40 Gb/s and net bit rates of
18.7, 29.9, and 37.4 Gb/s, respectively, after removing 7% forward-error-correction (FEC)
overhead [20]. Obviously, the 5-Gbaud signal has better transmission performance because

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Fig. 6. Constellations of QPSK signal at different baud rates and different distances. (a) 8 Gbaud
signal after 10 m with BER of 5
105 . (b) 10 Gbaud signal after 20 m with BER of 2
103 .
(c) 10 Gbaud signal after 40 m with BER of 2
102 . (d) 5 Gbaud signal after 80 m with BER of
1:1
103 .

Fig. 7. BER versus transmission distance for 5, 8, and 10 Gbaud PDM-QPSK signal.

Fig. 8. BER versus frequency difference of LO for the 10 Gbaud PDM-QPSK signal transmission
over 20 m wireless distance.

the bandwidth of optical components and electrical components in the link and the OSC meet
the corresponding requirement. For 10-Gbaud signal, the insufficient bandwidth of the OSC degrades the performance and the signal becomes smaller after long distance wireless transmission, which results in the decrease of the signal quality.
Fig. 8 shows the measured BER versus frequency (deviation) of the different LOs for the
10 Gbaud PDM-QPSK signal transmission over 20 m wireless distance. The experimental result
shows that the maximum tolerable deviation at this rate is about 1.25 GHz. Because the FOE
algorithm adopted in our system is based on the fourth power, and the maximum estimated
frequency offset is Rs/8, where Rs is the baud rate of QPSK signal [21]. Higher frequency offset
will degrade the signal performance after the signal is detected and offline processed by the

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algorithm. In addition, the figure shows that the best performance is not at the zero frequency
difference point but at 400 MHz frequency difference point. This is because the actual LO used
in the experiment has a certain deviation from the nominal value.

5. Conclusion
We experimentally demonstrated 5, 8, and 10 Gbaud wireless MIMO signals at W-band over 80,
40, and 20 m transmission. After removing 7% FEC overhead, the 5, 8, and 10 Gbaud baud rates
correspond to net bit rates of 18.7, 29.9, and 37.4 Gb/s, respectively. Besides, we investigate the
different frequency LO effect in the MIMO system and find that it can tolerate 1.25 GHz frequency deviation for 10 Gbaud signal due to the limit of the FOE algorithm used in the DSP. The
transmission distance can be extended to a few of kilometers if better electrical components
such as higher gain antenna or powerful mm-wave amplifiers are employed. Thus, this proposed
system may have the potential to be used in future last-mile access networks and disaster emergency communications.

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