Study on dispersion-induced phase noise in an optical OFDM radio-over-fiber system at 60-GHz band.

While coherency between an RF-tone and OFDM signals in RoF systems at 60 GHz is de-correlated by fiber dispersion, both phase rotation term (PRT) on each subcarrier and inter-carrier interference (ICI) between subcarriers are induced at a receiver. We analytically calculate the powers of PRT and ICI under different parameters, such as subcarrier number, modulation format, laser linewidth and transmission distance. Moreover, dispersion-induced ICI is shown to be non-Gaussian distributed by its kurtosis, and its distribution depends on system parameters. Therefore, using only the power of ICI cannot predict accurate bit error rate (BER) and corresponding power penalty. We propose to use t-distribution to fit the distribution of ICI, and it can be used to compute BER precisely.