Power-Over-Fiber Impact and Chromatic-Induced Power Fading on 5G NR Signals in Analog RoF

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the feasibility of optical powering in coexistence with radio transmission using baseband signals with 5G New Radio (5G NR) numerology with different bandwidths (BW) on Analog Radio over Fiber (ARoF) systems with single mode fibers (SMF). We focus on the impact of chromatic dispersion (CD), non-linear effects, High Power Laser (HPL) instabilities and their interactions, performing simulations and experiments. First, without Power over Fiber (PoF), we verify that increasing the BW of the 5G NR baseband signal reduces the CD-induced power fading at the critical RF frequency with the highest extinction and the error-vector magnitude (EVM) of the received 5G NR signal worsens. The CD-induced power fading is 10 dB smaller for 100 MHz versus 10 MHz baseband signal BWs. Then, we experimentally demonstrate the influence of a PoF signal, generated by a Raman HPL, on the transmission of 5G NR signals in a shared scenario with co-transmission of both PoF and data signals. The CD-induced power fading at the critical RF frequency with the highest extinction is 27 dB smaller for 5G NR signal BWs of 10 MHz and 100 MHz respectively when the HPL is set to +33 dBm. This PoF signal enhances the EVM of the received 5G NR signal to values in compliance with the standard while providing an On/Off Raman gain of 12.7 dB at 1552.8 nm data signal in a 14.43 km SMF link. For a 5G NR signal BW of 10 MHz and a RF carrier frequency of 17 GHz, the EVM improves from 31.3% to 11.6% for a HPL power of +33 dBm. For shorter distances such as 100 m, HPL noise transfer does not affect the EVM of data signal.