5G-Compatible IF-Over-Fiber Transmission Using a Low-Cost SFP-Class Transceiver

With the rise of 5G and beyond, ever-increasing data-rates demanded by mobile access are severely challenging capacity optical fronthaul networks. Despite its high reliability ease deployment, legacy digital radio-over-fiber (RoF) technologies face an upcoming bandwidth bottleneck in short term. This has motivated a renewed interest development analog RoF alternatives, owing to their spectral efficiency. However, unlike counterpart, transmission requires highly linear transceiver guarantee signal fidelity. Typical solutions exploited recent research works tend adopt use bulky benchtop components, such as directly modulated lasers (DML) photodiodes. Although this provides convenient quick path for proof-of-concept demonstrations, there is still considerable gap between lab developments commercial deployment. Most importantly, key question arises: can analog-RoF transceivers meet requirements while being competitive terms cost footprint? Following challenge, work we exploit low-cost off-the-shelf (COTS) small form-factor pluggable (SFP) transceiver, originally designed at 1 Gbps, which properly adapted towards transmission. Bypassing electronics circuitry SFP, keeping original transmitter sub-assembly (TOSA) receiver (ROSA), demonstrate that high-performance 5G-compatible be performed reusing built-in components current SFP-class transceivers. Particularly, error vector magnitude (EVM) performances compatible with 64QAM both 100MHz 400MHz. Furthermore, employing memory polynomial model pre-distortion transmitted signal, achieve 256QAM-compatible performance bandwidth, after 20 km