Experimental demonstration of the compensation of nonlinear propagation in a LTE RoF system with a directly modulated laser

This paper reveals that nonlinear propagation is a critical problem for the long term evolution (LTE) technology based on the radio-over-fibre (RoF) system. Therefore, a direct modulation based frequency dithering (DMFD) method is proposed for nonlinear propagation compensation, namely the self phase modulation (SPM) and stimulated brillouin scattering (SBS). We found that DMFD method operates substantially different in RoF systems. The major difference is that DMFD signal frequency f_d has to be much smaller than the RoF carrier frequency f_RF; thus the condition of {f_d << f_RF} has to be stringently obeyed. Analysis of the optical launch power (OLP) with DMFD method reveals that the SBS threshold is above ∼6 dBm for LTE-RoF system. In addition, we also unfold that DMFD method does not induce an additional distortion for the linear and optimum OLP regions, which are frequency chirp dependent. Hence the proposed method improves the LTE-RoF system without any shortcoming. Finally, at OLP values of 8 dBm and 10 dBm, LTE-RoF system exhibits an average error vector magnitude (EVM) improvement of ∼4.32% and ∼6.18%, respectively, for the 50 km transmission span.