4112 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO.

18, SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

Impact of Optical Transmission on Multiband

OFDM Ultra-Wideband Wireless
System With Fiber Distribution
Meer Nazmus Sakib, Bouchaib Hraimel, Xiupu Zhang, Senior Member, IEEE, Mohmoud Mohamed, Wei Jiang,
Ke Wu, Fellow, IEEE, and Dongya Shen

Abstract—Multiband (MB) orthogonal frequency-division wide personal area network working group of IEEE responded
multiplexing (OFDM) ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless, which by the draft 802.15.3a standard, which divides the whole
provides high data rate access, is required to be distributed by spectrum into 14 bands with bandwidth of 528 MHz for each
using optical fiber. The performance of MB-OFDM UWB over
fiber transmission system is investigated considering optical band [2]. The 14 channels are organized into five groups. Each
modulation and demodulation impact. Theoretical analysis of the group has three channels except group five, which has only
effect of fiber dispersion, optical transmitter, and optical receiver two channels. A variable throughput from 53.3 to 480 Mb/s in
response on system performance is carried out considering ampli- each channel is suggested. Other countries quickly followed
tude and phase distortion. Experiments are conducted and verified the FCC and IEEE initiative, though in Japan, Korea, China,
%
by our theoretical analysis and good agreement is obtained. It
is found that RF modulation index of 4 is optimum for
and European Union countries transmission in band group two
optical transmitter with Mach–Zehnder modulator, and optical (4.752–6.336 GHz) is not permitted to avoid interference with
receiver with Chebyshev-II response is the best for MB-OFDM existing IEEE 802.11a WLAN. The greatest advantage with
UWB over fiber. Compared to back-to-back UWB over fiber, UWB radio is that it is software configurable, so any of the
optical transmission is mainly limited by laser phase noise con- frequency bands can be turned off to meet specific spectral
verted relative intensity noise and phase distortion induced by
requirements. However, the WiMedia alliance was the first to
fiber dispersion when optimum modulation index is used. Higher
modulation index is limited by amplitude and phase distortion take major initiative toward the implementation by selecting
to OFDM signal induced by optical transmitter and receiver re- multiband (MB) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing
sponse nonlinearities and fiber dispersion and the spectral mask. (OFDM) for high-speed UWB wireless [3]. In December 2007,
It is also found that highly received optical power is required for European Computer Manufacturers’ Association (ECMA)
transmission of MB-OFDM UWB signal over fiber. adopted the WiMedia approach and ratified ECMA-368 stan-
Index Terms—Multiband OFDM, optical fiber communication, dard [4], which gave huge boost for the industry and academia.
radio over fiber, subcarrier modulation, ultra-wideband wireless An MB OFDM signal consists of 128 subcarriers using
communication. quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) for lower bit rates. How-
ever, advanced dual carrier modulation technique is used for bit
I. INTRODUCTION rate of higher than 200 Mb/s. Fig. 1(a) shows RF spectrum for
the first three bands of the 14 bands with bit rate of 200 Mb/s
HE basic concept of ultra wideband (UWB) is to use for each band, and the three bands are centered at frequency
T ultrashort pulse ( ns) in time domain to spread the
frequency energy over wide bandwidth ( MHz) to a low
of , , and
follows simple frequency hoping sequences like , , and
. The signal

level, in order to share the spectrum with existing narrowband as shown in Fig. 1(b) that is the spectrogram. Fig. 1(c) shows
transmission without causing unwanted interference. The US the three bands in the time domain.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was the first to New applications of UWB such as downloading high-defini-
open radio spectrum of 3.1–10.6 GHz for UWB use [1]. The tion video from a distant mainframe server using a handheld de-
vice, transferring data from embedded sensors far away from the
Manuscript received December 02, 2008; revised February 23, 2009. First control center or simultaneously transmitting a number of video
published May 08, 2009; current version published August 21, 2009.This work streams and control signals from video surveillance system in
was supported in part by the project from Fonds de recherché sur la nature et les long tunnels require extending the limited range of MB-OFDM
technologies (FQRNT), Quebec, Canada.
M. Sakib, B. Hraimel, X. Zhang, M. Mohamed, and W. Jiang are with the Ad-
UWB. Due to very low-power, wide-bandwidth, and high-fre-
vanced Photonic Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer quency signals of the UWB, distribution of UWB over coaxial
Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada (e-mail: cable is pretty expensive. On the other hand, fiber has low loss,
xzhang@ece.concordia.ca).
K. Wu is with Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Montreal, QC H3T 1J4,
low cost, and wide-bandwidth characteristics. This suggests that
Canada. radio over fiber is an efficient technique for distribution of UWB
D. Shen is with the School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Yunnan wireless, i.e., UWB over fiber.
University, Yunnan 650091, China.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
Indeed, distribution of UWB wireless through single-mode
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. fiber (SMF) [5] and multimode fiber [6], [7] were experimen-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JLT.2009.2022508 tally demonstrated using directly modulated laser diodes. It was
0733-8724/$26.00 © 2009 IEEE
SAKIB et al.: IMPACT OF OPTICAL TRANSMISSION ON MULTIBAND OFDM ULTRA-WIDEBAND WIRELESS SYSTEM WITH FIBER DISTRIBUTION 4113

Fig. 2. Experimental setup for externally modulated MB-OFDM UWB over

fiber system (BW: bandwidth, G: gain, NF: noise figure, R: responsivity).

power requirement in the UWB over fiber system, which was

not clarified in [9], is elucidated. Finally, our conclusions are
drawn in Section V.

II. EXPERIMENTAL SYSTEM CONFIGURATION

Fig. 1. First three channels of MB-OFDM UWB wireless in (a) frequency do- The considered system setup for the performance evalua-
main, (b) frequency-time domain, and (c) time domain.
tion of UWB over fiber is shown in Fig. 2. A commercially
available evaluation board, DV9110M, from WisAir, pro-
shown that direct laser modulation can be used to transmit UWB viding MB-OFDM compliant modulation with three WiMedia
signals for up to 5 km of SMF, and it was found that direct mod- subbands allocated at center frequency of 3.432, 3.96 and
ulation is limited by laser bandwidth, linewidth, stability, and 4.488 GHz, is used for MB-UWB generation and reception.
relative intensity (RIN) noise [8]. To have UWB wireless cov- The RF signal is amplified and variable attenuator is used
erage of larger than 20 km, similar to fiber-to-the home appli- to vary the RF power. A continuous wave (CW) light from
cations, it was proposed to use externally modulated UWB over tunable laser source (Anritsu MG9541A) have a wavelength
fiber [9]. Recently, transmission UWB signals over SMF using of 1550 nm, linewidth of 800 KHz, intrinsic RIN noise of
external and direct modulation was examined and compared be- dB , and output power of 0 dBm. The CW light is
tween impulse and MB-OFDM UWB [10]. injected into a 10.7 Gb/s dual-electrode Mach–Zehnder modu-
In this paper, we, for the first time to our knowledge, inves- lator (DE-MZM) from Fujitsu, driven by the UWB signal from
tigate the combined effect of fiber dispersion and nonlineari- the output of the DV9110M Tx module. The MZM has 6 dB
ties of optical transmitter’s and optical receiver’s response on insertion loss and an extinction ratio of 28.5 dB.
the OFDM subcarriers for MB-OFDM UWB over fiber system To obtain optical single sideband (OSSB) modulation, the
through detailed theoretical and experimental analysis. The ef- UWB signal is applied to both branches of the DE-MZM
fect of optical receiver response and received optical power at through a hybrid coupler and bias-T with a 90 phase shifter in
the photodetector is investigated in an MB-OFDM UWB over one branch. On the contrary, to generate optical double sideband
fiber system. Simplified and general analyses are used to verify (ODSB), the same signal is directly applied to both electrodes
and explain the experimental results. of the MZM with 0 phase shift. The modulated lightwave is
The paper is organized into five sections. In Section II, the sent through SMF, with fiber loss of dB and
experimental setup is described. Theoretical analyses are given chromatic dispersion of 17 ps/(nm km). We consider UWB over
in Section III considering amplitude and phase distortion expe- fiber with back-to-back 20 and 40 km of fiber transmission.
rienced by each of the OFDM subcarriers within one symbol. In After fiber transmission, the UWB signal is optically amplified
Section IV, the performance of UWB over fiber system is clar- by an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) and then a JDS
ified with focus on the ECMA-368 standard using MB OFDM. tunable grating filter with bandwidth of 0.55 nm and insertion
Optical transmitter’s nonlinearities and fiber dispersion effect loss of 2 dB is used before being detected by a high-speed pho-
on system performance are studied experimentally and com- todiode (Discovery DSC-740 with 3-dB bandwidth of 35 GHz
pared to the theoretical analysis. Also, simulations and exper- and responsivity of 0.62 A/W). The EDFA gain is controlled in
iments are performed to assess the effect of optical receiver’s such a way that the insertion loss of all optical components and
response on UWB performance. In addition, received optical fiber is compensated. After photodetection the UWB signal is
4114 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 18, SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

electrically filtered by a JDF electrical bandpass filter (EBF) fiber dispersion and RF carrier phase noise induced phase dis-
of bandwidth of 3 GHz and then amplified by a broadband RF tortion is given.
amplifier from SHF (SHF-810) ( ) as shown in Fig. 2. The MB OFDM RF signal ( ) is related to the complex
The broadband photodetector combined with the broadband RF baseband signal ( ) of the OFDM symbol as [2]
amplifier is referred to “ideal” optical receiver. Here, the “ideal”
optical receiver means that it does not introduce amplitude and
phase distortion to the OFDM signal. The received signal is
evaluated with a high-speed real-time oscilloscope DSO 91204
from Agilent Technologies [11]. where is the symbol period, is the number of OFDM
At the real-time oscilloscope, the received signal is first inter- symbols, is the driving voltage of the UWB signal, and
nally amplified using a low-noise amplifier and down converted and is the carrier frequency and phase noise of RF carrier
to the complex baseband using I and Q mixers. The complex local oscillator, respectively.
baseband signal is low-pass filtered to reject out of band inter- The OFDM symbols can be constructed using inverse
ferers. The signal is then sampled and quantized using an ADC FFT (IFFT) with a certain coefficients , which can consist of
to obtain the complex digital baseband signal. The real-time data symbols, pilots, and training symbols
oscilloscope has a large memory that stores about five million
samples of the signal for processing. Baseband processing be-
gins with the packet detection followed by Fast Fourier trans-
form (FFT) operation. The output of the FFT is equalized using
a frequency domain equalizer. A phase correction is applied
to the output of the equalizer to undo the effect of carrier and where is the total number of subcarrier used,
timing mismatch between transmitter and receiver according to MHz is the subcarrier frequency spacing,
ECMA-368 standard [4]. The pilot tones in each OFDM symbol is the subcarrier number, ns is the cyclic prefix,
are used to drive the digital phase-locked loop. The output of ns is the IFFT/FFT period, and
the equalizer is demapped and deinterleaved before passing to is the signal bandwidth.
a Viterbi decoder. The error corrected bit sequence is descram- For one OFDM symbol, we have the equation given at the
bled and passed on to the medium access control layer for fur- bottom of the page, where is angular frequency of the RF
ther processing [11]. carrier, is subcarrier spacing and is the
baseband QPSK signal.
III. THEORETICAL ANALYSIS The MB-OFDM UWB signal is applied to the DE-MZM
In this section, we theoretically analyze MB-OFDM UWB to modulate a CW lightwave with an optical power and a
over fiber transmission with OSSB modulation. The common random phase at a wavelength . For OSSB modulation,
way to generate OSSB is to use a DE-MZM modulator. How- the DE-MZM is biased at quadrature. The DE-MZM is assumed
ever, an MZM modulator is known to be inherently nonlinear in to have an optical insertion loss of . The output optical field
response and may introduce high nonlinear distortion to which from the modulated DE-MZM can be written as
OFDM signals are exposed. On the other hand, at the receiver
side a narrowband EBF is usually used to filter out the data-mod-
ulated RF carrier, and the filter determines the optical receiver’s
response. This filter may have a great impact on the perfor-
mance of the received data because of its response that may
introduce phase and amplitude distortion to which MB UWB where is the speed of light in a vacuum,
OFDM signal is vulnerable. Therefore, the theoretical analysis is RF modulation index, is the voltage required
includes the effect of MZM response nonlinearities, fiber dis- to induce a phase shift at the MZM, and denotes the
persion, and optical receiver’s response. Finally, EVM due to Hilbert transform of .
SAKIB et al.: IMPACT OF OPTICAL TRANSMISSION ON MULTIBAND OFDM ULTRA-WIDEBAND WIRELESS SYSTEM WITH FIBER DISTRIBUTION 4115

After transmission over optical fiber of length , loss , and Considering low RF modulation index of and the
dispersion , the optical field can be rewritten as the equation ideal optical receiver, we can simplify (1) into
shown at the bottom of the page, where is the gain of the
optical amplifier, is the angular frequency
subcarrier of the symbol, is the -order Bessel function
of first kind, and are group velocity and
group velocity dispersion coefficient of the fiber, respectively.
After photodetection and electrical filtering, the received Using the approximation of , the received
subcarrier current of the OFDM symbol can be expressed as OFDM symbol can be written
(1), where is the responsivity of the photodetector,
is transfer function of the optical receiver, and is Gaussian
random phase noise with zero mean and variance from the
RF carrier. The laser phase noise is canceled in (1) due to
self-heterodyne detection. where is the normalized re-
ceived symbol corresponding to the transmitted symbol
on the subcarrier. Assuming that constant
delay will be compensated by cyclic prefix, the error vector
magnitude (EVM) can be approximated using [12]

Using the following identities

where and are independent random variables. Aver-

(1) aging we get

Equation (1) shows that each subcarrier will be distorted in

amplitude and phase. This distortion results from intrinsic non-
linearities of the DE-MZM response, fiber dispersion, and fre-
(2)
quency response of the optical receiver.
4116 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 18, SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

The expression given by (2) is the EVM induced by phase

distortion. Both RF carrier phase noise and fiber dispersion will
introduce relative phase shift between the OFDM subcarriers.
Thus, intercarrier interference (ICI) will be induced and OFDM
orthogonality will be lost.
Accounting for other sources of noise such as thermal, RIN,
optical amplifier, and shot noise, the total EVM can be expressed
as [13]

(3)

where is the received signal to noise ratio, with Fig. 3. Measured EVM with RF modulation index with a parameter of fiber
as the received UWB signal power and as the noise power length for bit rate of (a) 53.3 Mb/s and (b) 200 Mb/s.
as explained in Appendix B. Fiber dispersion not only induces
relative phase shift between OFDM subcarriers but also con-
verts the laser phase noise to RIN. Therefore, SNR in (3) also To fully understand the behaviors in Fig. 3, it is required
includes the converted RIN that depends on fiber dispersion. In to have full understanding of nonlinear distortion. It is well
Appendix B, the converted RIN is analyzed. known that the OFDM signal has a high peak to average power
ratio (PAPR). The measured PAPR for the UWB signal is about
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 14–17 dB from the DV9110 module. Nonlinear distortion for
the UWB signal can be induced by RF amplifier due to large
To make sure that UWB wireless with fiber distribution as PAPR, phase noise of the RF carrier local oscillator due to PM
shown in Fig. 2 satisfies the FCC’s spectral requirement, the to AM (i.e., PM/AM) conversion and nonlinear response of the
received signal is tested using the data analyzer and it is found MZM. However, RF amplifier can induce nonlinear distortion
that the UWB signal passed the spectral mask test and measured only at higher RF power level. But, for OFDM UWB, the RF
adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) was higher than 20 dB amplifier is operated in the linear region for most of the time
for RF modulation index of up to 8% at the MZM. Thus, RF owing to low power spectral density of the UWB. The phase
modulation index of up to 8% is only considered in the following noise may induce nonlinear distortion due to PM/AM conver-
investigation to abide by the FCC regulation. sion and created PM/AM modulation is imposed onto the com-
It is well known that there are two optical subcarrier mod- plex waveform.
ulation techniques, i.e., OSSB and ODSB. In Appendix A, we Nonlinear distortion induced by the nonlinearities of the
experimentally compare the performance of the two modulation MZM due to AM/AM modulation and fiber dispersion due to
techniques in the system. It is shown that the ODSB modulation PM/AM conversion is the most important. It is revealed by (1)
cannot be used in the MB-OFDM UWB wireless system with that the MZM nonlinearities combined with fiber dispersion
fiber distribution. Therefore, we only consider the OSSB mod- will induce both AM/AM and PM/AM distortion within one
ulation technique in the following investigation. symbol.
In this section, we first analyze the impact of optical mod- To distinguish the impact of the MZM response nonlinearities
ulation and fiber transmission. Then, the impact of optical de- and fiber dispersion, we first consider the back-to-back UWB
modulation is investigated. Finally, we investigate the impact of over fiber, i.e., without fiber. If the response nonlinearities of
received optical power on UWB system. the DE-MZM are only considered, (1) is reduced to

A. Impact of Optical Modulation and Fiber Transmission

Using the setup as shown in Fig. 2, we experimentally char- (4)
acterize the impact of optical modulation and fiber transmission
using measured EVM. For different fiber lengths, we adjust the where the ideal optical receiver response is assumed.
gain of the EDFA to fully compensate for all loss and keep the It can be noted from (4), that the received constella-
same input power to the photodiode. The ideal optical receiver tion is rotated by 45 . It is also shown that there is a pure
used has broadband with flat magnitude and linear delay over AM/AM conversion-induced distortion due to the term of
the considered signal bandwidth. Fig. 3 shows measured EVM , which depends only on the
with RF modulation index for UWB over fiber with fiber length total transmitted RF power level at the MZM. Fig. 4 shows the
of 0, 20, and 40 km, considering bit rate of 53.3 and 200 Mb/s. relative amplitude (i.e., ) of
It is apparent that the minimum EVM is obtained at RF mod- the 128 subcarriers versus RF modulation index for the second
ulation index of 3–4% for both 53.3 and 200 Mb/s, almost in- band. It is obvious that the amplitude of all the 128 subcarriers
dependent of the bit rate, as shown in Fig. 3(a) and (b). At the is the same for any modulation index and almost linearly
low RF power, the EVM is high due to low SNR. On the other increases with modulation index at RF modulation index of
hand, at the high power level the EVM increases due to MZM up to 4%. However, RF modulation index of higher than
nonlinearities and fiber-dispersion-induced nonlinear distortion 4% will decrease the amplitude, i.e., AM/AM compression.
mainly. Consequently, RF modulation index of 4% is found optimum
SAKIB et al.: IMPACT OF OPTICAL TRANSMISSION ON MULTIBAND OFDM ULTRA-WIDEBAND WIRELESS SYSTEM WITH FIBER DISTRIBUTION 4117

Fig. 6. Calculated phase distortion of subcarriers (1, 32, 64, 96, and 128) in
band 2 versus RF modulation index at (a) 20 and (b) 40 km of fiber transmission.
Fig. 4. Relative amplitude of subcarriers in second band versus RF modulation
index for back-to-back UWB over fiber.

Fig. 7. Calculated EVM degradation versus fiber length with respect to

back-to-back and 0 dBm received optical power. Black square: experimental
results for 20, 40, and 51 km.
Fig. 5. Calculated relative amplitude of subcarriers at 1, 32, 64, 96, and 128 in
band 2 versus RF modulation index for UWB over fiber at (a) 20 and (b) 40 km
of fiber.
45 for 20 and 40 km of fiber transmission, respectively. Also,
as expected, different subcarriers have different phase shifts for
theoretically. This optimum modulation index of 4% is almost the same modulation index. In fact, fiber dispersion induces
in good agreement with the earlier experimental results as frequency dependent group delay at each subcarrier. Using (1),
shown in Fig. 3. However, there is a small discrepancy between the calculated group delay over the band 2 varies by and
the optimum modulation indexes found from Figs. 3 and 4. This ps for 20 and 40 km of fiber, respectively.
small discrepancy is mainly due to our simplified approach Relative phase shift between subcarriers will induce ICI and
used in theory where it is assumed that all subcarriers are result in loss of orthogonality. We then investigate the impact of
carrying data, MZM extinction ratio is infinite, and there is no phase mismatch between subcarriers on the EVM of the system
dependence of transmitted power level on bit rate. versus fiber dispersion. For RF modulation index of 4%, the
In order to investigate the combined effect of fiber dispersion amplitude mismatch between subcarriers is negligible. In the
and MZM response nonlinearities on each of the 128 subcar- EVM computation, we assume that any constant delay can be
riers, relative amplitude of the subcarriers at 1, 32, 64, 96, and compensated by cyclic prefix, and the received complex base-
128 in the second band (centered at 3.96 GHz) after fiber trans- band symbol is normalized. Calculated EVM degradation of
mission of 20 and 40 km is shown in Fig. 5, calculated by (1). It the system versus fiber length using (3) is shown in Fig. 7. In
is shown that all the subcarriers have identical relative amplitude the calculation, we used measured EVM of dB without
that increases almost linearly with the RF modulation index of fiber link directly from UWB generator and SNR computed
up to 4 . However, the subcarriers may not have the same due to thermal noise only, which gives a phase noise power
amplitude if modulation index is more than 4%. For example, of . The EVM degradation is obtained with re-
at the modulation index of 10%, the subcarriers have different spect to the back-to-back at modulation index of 4%. Compared
amplitudes as shown in Fig. 5(a) and (b). This is contrary to the to the back-to-back, it is clearly shown that EVM degradation
back-to-back transmission as shown in Fig. 4. Any amplitude of and dB is expected after 20 and 40 km of
mismatch between subcarriers will distort the received constel- fiber transmission, respectively. This is in good agreement with
lation and degrade the EVM. the measurement in Fig. 3. However, the experimental EVM is
For the back-to-back UWB over fiber system, the relative slightly better because of the complex demodulation and error
phase of the 128 subcarriers is constant and for any mod- correction schemes used at the UWB receiver. The EVM degra-
ulation index. Because fiber dispersion will induce different dation shown in Fig. 7 is due to increased RIN due to the in-
phase shifts for different subcarriers, the subcarrier phase will teraction of the laser phase noise and chromatic dispersion as
depend on fiber length and modulation index. Corresponding shown in Appendix B, and the phase distortion induced by fiber
to Fig. 5, Fig. 6 shows the relative phase shift of the subcarriers dispersion as given in (2). Note that for Fig. 7, a UWB over fiber
mentioned earlier with modulation index. It is seen that the system only with a single optical amplifier is considered in order
relative phase shift is changed from to 45 and to to show the impact of fiber-dispersion-related penalty.
4118 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 18, SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

Fig. 8. (a) Measured magnitude jS j and (b) measured phase response of the
experimental filter measured with a HP 8720 vector network analyzer.
Fig. 10. Simulated EVM using optical receiver with different responses. The
others are the same as in Fig. 9.

obtained for using the two optical receivers. However, with ideal
receiver response there is discrepancy in EVM performance at
higher modulation index due to nonlinearity of the RF ampli-
fier and harmonic distortion effects arising from the A/D con-
verters of the real-time oscilloscope. It is found that the EVM is
degraded by more than 2 dB at modulation index of 4% due to
using the optical receiver with Chebyshev-I response. Due to the
in-band ripples of the Chebyshev-I response, some of the sub-
carriers of the OFDM signal are distorted in amplitude. Also,
Fig. 9. Measured (symbol) and simulated (line) EVM using two receivers. the filter’s phase or group delay response may cause a slow
Black square: experimental results using optical Rx with Chebyshev-I response. varying decay trail and can smear the signal at the edges [14].
Black circle: experimental results using the “ideal” optical Rx. Smearing will increase the delay spread resulting in intersymbol
interference.
To further understand the impact of optical receiver response,
By the earlier analysis, we conclude that RF modulation index we consider optical receiver with fifth-order Butterworth,
of 4 is optimum. For modulation index of above 4%, it Bessel, Chebyshev-II, and Gaussian response, respectively.
was found that MZM response nonlinearities and fiber-disper- Simulated EVM using the earlier optical receivers is shown in
sion-induced nonlinear distortion degrades the UWB wireless Fig. 10. The bandwidth is 3 GHz for all the optical receivers. It
system performance. This is the reason why the EVM in Fig. 3 is seen that the optical receiver with Gaussian response leads
is increased with modulation index if more than 4%. to the best performance. A Gaussian filter with fifth order
has flat magnitude and zero delay response in the passband.
B. Impact of Optical Demodulation So, the performance using the optical receiver with Gaussian
In this subsection, we will analyze the impact of optical de- response will be similar to the ideal receiver. But a Gaussian
modulation. We consider two cases: one is the “ideal” optical response is not physically realizable. In Fig. 10, the EVM using
receiver and the other is bandwidth limited and has variation of Butterworth response is dB compared to dB
magnitude and time delay over the OFDM signal bandwidth. using Chebyshev-I in Fig. 9 at modulation index of 4% and it is
The bandwidth-limited optical receiver is obtained by inserting evident that Butterworth response performs slightly better than
a bandwidth-limited electrical filter in the “ideal” optical re- Chebyshev-I response of the same order because Butterworth
ceiver. Equation (1) shows that the bandwidth-limited optical has a flat magnitude response and better delay characteristics
receiver response will have great impact on overall performance. than Chebyshev-I filter.
We used a Chebyshev-I bandpass filter centered at frequency To achieve a sharp cutoff, a higher order Butterworth filter
with a 3 dB bandwidth of 3 GHz. The magnitude is required. But, higher order Butterworth filter will have high
and phase response measured are shown in Fig. 8. It is clearly overshoot and instability in response compared to Bessel and
seen from Fig. 8(a) that the magnitude response of filter has Chebyshev-II filter [15] and lower order Butterworth filter
a ripple of dB over the passband. It is expected that the does not fulfill filtering requirements due to its wide passband.
magnitude ripple will induce distortion for the subcarriers of the Bessel filter’s performance is in between Butterworth and
OFDM signal. Chebyshev-II response since Bessel filter has a linear phase
We measured EVM for the system with fiber transmission of response and excellent impulse response with minimal over-
20 km, where the two receivers are used. Fig. 9 shows mea- shoot within its passband. For a given order, its magnitude
sured EVM with RF modulation index. We also simulate the response is not as flat as Butterworth and other filters. Also, a
UWB over fiber system using VPI-Transmission Maker™ and Bessel filter requires more complex design and is difficult to
MATLAB by using an approach followed by Pizzinat et al. [8]. integrate with a receiver front end. Consequently it may not
The simulated EVM is also shown in Fig. 9. It is seen that a be appropriate. In Fig. 10, it is clear that EVM performance
good agreement between the simulated and measured EVM is using optical receiver with Chebyshev-II response is better
SAKIB et al.: IMPACT OF OPTICAL TRANSMISSION ON MULTIBAND OFDM ULTRA-WIDEBAND WIRELESS SYSTEM WITH FIBER DISTRIBUTION 4119

in between fifth-order filter with 2.5 GHz and third-order filter

with 2.5 GHz. For the 3 dB bandwidth, a seventh-order filter
has a very sharp cutoff, but its delay response is not as good as
third- and fifth-order filter. Also, microwave filter with higher
than fifth order is complex to be implemented and is expensive.
Fig. 11 shows that the EVM performance using third-order
filter with 3 GHz, fifth-order 3 and 3.5 GHz filter’s response
is alike since their average delay fluctuation is close (42, 47,
and 40 ps, respectively). On the other hand, the best filter order
and bandwidth of the optical receiver in uplink UWB over fiber
system may also depend on environment, because an UWB an-
tenna may be placed close to some narrowband interferers like
Fig. 11. Simulated EVM with Chebyshev-II filter order and bandwidth for
200 Mb/s UWB signal transmitted over 20 km of fiber. GSM at 0.8–0.9 GHz and microwave ovens at 1.5–2 GHz. So,
for uplink when the data is received by a base station from a user
with an antenna under the presence of such narrowband inter-
than using optical receiver with Chebyshev-I, Butterworth, ferers, optical receiver with third-order filter response can per-
and Bessel response. The response of a Chebyshev-II filter is form poorly due to its slowly decaying stopband and the large
equiripple in the stopband and monotonic in the passband. Also magnitude of out of band ripples. From magnitude response in
Chebyshev-II’s delay response is moderate. In OFDM signal, Appendix C, it is seen that third-order 3 GHz filter will not sat-
all the subcarriers are independent of each other. As a result, isfy the required 20 dB suppression of the sidebands. So, op-
the subcarriers can be added constructively or destructively, tical receiver with fifth-order filter response is a better choice
resulting in a very large or weak signal, respectively. This is than third-order filter response for filtering of MB-OFDM UWB
why the OFDM signal has a large PAPR and will suffer badly signals.
from nonlinearity. Since OFDM signals are highly sensitive As stated before, increasing the filter bandwidth for a given
to amplitude distortion, Chebyshev-II response at the receiver order improves its delay response, and therefore reduces the
front end gives better EVM because the filter will introduce EVM. But, the receiver noise increases if the electrical band-
hardly any amplitude distortion. So, Chebyshev-II response is width of optical receiver is increased which is explained in
the best choice for optical receiver in UWB over fiber system. Appendix B. Consequently, an optical receiver with bandwidth
Now, to find out the optimum order and bandwidth, we as narrow as possible should be selected under the condition
carry out simulations using Chebyshev-II response with dif- of without introducing amplitude and delay distortion. It is
ferent order and bandwidth. Only odd-orders are considered also seen from Fig. 11 that the EVM performance using the
since even-order Chebyshev filter requires an extra impedance fifth-order filter response was improved by only 0.29 dB at RF
matching network [16]. modulation index of 4% when the bandwidth is increased from
Simulated EVM with modulation index is presented in Fig. 11 3 GHz to 3.5 GHz. Therefore, 3 GHz is considered the op-
for 20 km of fiber transmission and bit rate of 200 Mb/s. The timum bandwidth, which is roughly two times of the bandwidth
bandpass filter was centered at 4 GHz and the bandwidth was ( MHz) of the band.
varied. Fig. 11 shows that EVM performance is greatly depen-
dent on filter order and bandwidth. The change in EVM can be C. Effect of Receiver Noise and Received Optical Power
explained from the magnitude and delay response of the filter, Until now, we have assumed all the losses due to fiber and
which is presented in Appendix C. It is seen that Chebyshev-II optical components are compensated using an EDFA. To see the
has flat magnitude response in the passband. So, only delay re- effect of the received optical power, we first operate the system
sponse may degrade EVM performance. for the best EVM at data rate of 200 Mb/s by setting the RF
If the delay fluctuates within the passband, the OFDM sub- modulation index to 4% and received optical power to 0 dBm at
carriers undergo different phase shift. The effect of delay fluctu- the photodetector. Then, we insert a precision variable optical
ation due to filter response is similar to the effect of phase shift attenuator Agilent 8156A before the photodetector to vary the
introduced by fiber dispersion. A filter’s group delay and over- received optical power.
shoot are nearly proportional to the filter order and inversely Fig. 12 shows measured EVM at 200 Mb/s considering
proportional to the filter bandwidth. So, for a higher order filter back-to-back and after 20 km of fiber. The EVM performance
if the bandwidth is increased the delay response gets better. It is degraded as the received optical power decreases. To under-
is seen that if the bandwidth is low, e.g., 2 GHz, the EVM de- stand the behavior in Fig. 12, we study the impairment of noise.
grades because the OFDM subcarriers near the edges experi- In Appendix B, each contribution of thermal noise, shot noise,
ence a slight attenuation and high group delay fluctuation. The RIN, signal-ASE beat, and ASE-ASE beat noise is studied. It is
delay within the signal bandwidth varies from 80 to 250 ps for found that signal-ASE beat noise is dominant in additive noise.
fifth-order Chebyshev-II response with 2 GHz bandwidth. In Therefore, EVM decrease with the increase of the received
contrast, the average delay fluctuation is 57, 80, and 62 ps for optical power is due to the fact that UWB RF power is increased
third-order filter with 2.5 GHz, fifth-order filter with 2.5 GHz, with the increase of received optical power. The total EVM
and seventh-order filter with 3 GHz, respectively. Consequently, dependency on the optical power [given by (3)] is of the form
the EVM performance using seventh-order filter with 3 GHz is , A-constant, and does not depend
4120 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 18, SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

dispersion and are immune to amplitude distortion that could be

induced by the combined effect of MZM response nonlineari-
ties and fiber dispersion. However, if modulation index is more
than 4%, the OFDM subcarriers suffer from both amplitude and
phase distortion due to the combined effect of MZM response
nonlinearities and fiber dispersion. Therefore, modulation index
of 4% is optimum to achieve the best EVM.
Moreover, when the optimum modulation index is used, fiber
transmission is further limited by laser phase noise converted
RIN due to fiber dispersion and phase distortion induced by fiber
dispersion in addition to increase of optical amplifier noise due
to fiber loss, compared to back-to-back UWB over fiber.
Fig. 12. Measured EVM versus received optical power at photodetector.
Also, it has been found that the optical receiver response
has significant impact on EVM performance. It is found that
Chebyshev-II response with 3 GHz and fifth order is the best
for MB-OFDM UWB over fiber. This is due to low amplitude
and phase distortion within the passband. Since the UWB over
fiber is operated at a low RF modulation index and MB UWB
has a low power spectral density, it is found that required optical
power at optical receiver in UWB over fiber is reasonably higher
than that in radio over fiber with other modulation schemes.
Furthermore, we have found that EVM in UWB over fiber is
degraded almost linearly with the decrease of receiver optical
Fig. 13. Calculated EVM degradation versus received optical power for power.
back-to-back transmission with respect to 0 dBm received optical power.
APPENDIX A
We compare the OSSB and ODSB, as commonly used optical
on optical power. It is clear that EVM degradation is inversely external modulation techniques. Fig. 14(a) and (d) show mea-
proportional to received optical power. sured optical spectrum using OSSB and ODSB, respectively.
We calculate the EVM degradation versus received optical Fig. 14(b), (c), and (e), (f) show measured RF spectrum using
power as shown in Fig. 13. It is evident from Fig. 13 that the OSSB and ODSB, respectively for back-to-back and 20 km. For
EVM degrades almost linearly with the received optical power. best EVM performance, we used an RF modulation index of 4%,
Experimental results in Fig. 12 are in good agreement with cal- and it is well known that OSSB is used to overcome chromatic
culated EVM from 0 up to . However, there is a small dispersion caused power fading by suppression of one of the
discrepancy at low optical power and it is due to the limited sen- optical sidebands [17]. However, there is a 3 dB power loss if
sitivity of the real-time oscilloscope that has difficulty in trig- compared to ODSB. Conversely, ODSB does suffer from power
gering at low RF power level. fading specially for back-to-back because optical sidebands are
As shown in Fig. 12, there is a difference in EVM perfor- out of phase and will beat with the optical carrier and add de-
mance between back-to-back and 20 km of fiber, which is ex- structively to produce a single RF signal. Fig. 15 shows com-
plained in Fig. 7. parison of EVM using OSSB and ODSB for back-to-back and
Another important finding from Fig. 12 is that the received after 20 km of fiber transmission. Fig. 15 shows that the EVM
is dB or 71% at data rate of 200 Mb/s for the back-to-back
optical power required in UWB over fiber is higher compared
with ODSB. At 20 km, the EVM for ODSB modulation is sig-
to conventional radio over fiber, which can work with optical
nificantly improved compared to the back-to-back because chro-
power of as low as [17]. The higher optical power matic dispersion of fiber causes each optical sideband to have
requirement is due to the low RF modulation index and the low different phase shift depending on the fiber length, frequency of
power spectral density ( MHz) of the UWB RF RF signal, and fiber dispersion; thus, the power of the detected
signal. RF signal changes as shown in Fig. 14(e) and (f).
In opposition, the OSSB is almost independent of fiber dis-
V. CONCLUSION persion. As shown in Fig. 15, the EVM is very close and less
In this work, we have experimentally investigated and theo- than dB for both back-to-back and after 20 km of fiber
retically analyzed the performance of MB-OFDM UWB when transmission.
transmitted over fiber. EVM is employed to evaluate the system The power fading in ODSB repeats at periodic fiber lengths
quality of UWB signal considering system’s parameters such as and can be compensated using different compensation tech-
RF modulation index of MZM, fiber transmission, and received niques at the expense of increased complexity and cost [17]. It
optical power. Performance degradation of MB-OFDM UWB is clearly seen from Fig. 15 that OSSB outperforms ODSB at
caused by various impairments including MZM nonlinearities, any power level and fiber length. Therefore, OSSB modulation
fiber dispersion, and optical receiver response are also compre- is only considered in this paper.
hensively investigated. With OSSB modulation, the QPSK constellation for data and
It is found that for RF modulation index of up to 4 BPSK constellation for pilots after 20 km at 200 Mb/s is pre-
OFDM subcarriers suffer from relative phase shift due to fiber sented in Fig. 16 (measured with a Lecroy serial data analyzer
SAKIB et al.: IMPACT OF OPTICAL TRANSMISSION ON MULTIBAND OFDM ULTRA-WIDEBAND WIRELESS SYSTEM WITH FIBER DISTRIBUTION 4121

Fig. 16. Received QPSK constellation diagram and physical interpretation of

the diagram.

where and are the transfer function of the op-

tical and electrical filter, respectively. Because the optical band-
width is considerably larger than the signal bandwidth, the op-
tical filter won’t affect the UWB signal but only the ASE noise.
Variance of the ASE-ASE beat noise, , signal-ASE
beat noise, , and electrical noise, , at the re-
ceiver can be expressed as [18]

Fig. 14. Measured optical signal before photodetection for (a) OSSB and
(d) ODSB and RF signal at the real-time oscilloscope for (b) OSSB and 0 km,
(c) OSSB and 20 km, (e) ODSB and 0 km, and (f) ODSB and 20 km.

which consists of contribution of RIN,

Fig. 15. Measured EVM using OSSB and ODSB.

shot noise,
SDA 11000). The good quality of the constellation is an indica-
tion of suitability of the RoF systems for UWB applications.

APPENDIX B
and thermal noise, .
Let us assume that the optical and electrical filter are rectan- Where is the complex conjugate of the received op-
gular with equivalent bandwidth tical signal at the photodetector, dB is the RF am-
plifier gain at the optical receiver, is the received optical
power, and represents the single-sided ASE noise density
for a single polarization expressed by ,
and , the Plank’s constant, , the wavelength of the laser source, ,
speed of light in vacuum, and noise figure of dB and gain
of dB of the EDFA. The symbol denotes the convolu-
tion. is the noise contribution from both optical transmitter
4122 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 18, SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

Fig. 17. Noise power level at the receiver versus received optical power for
back-to-back transmission.

Fig. 19. Simulated (a) magnitude and (b) delay response of Chebyshev-II filter.

Fig. 18. Calculated total RIN versus fiber length.

where is the signal occupied bandwidth,

is the fiber length, and is the laser
and receiver electronic noise, and this is called “back-to-back”
intrinsic RIN.
system noise (shot noise, thermal noise, and RIN). is the elec-
For the frequency band of 3.176 to 4.744 GHz, the dispersion
tron charge, and is the dark current. The variance
increases the RIN by 6.7 and 11.8 dB for 20 and 40 km, respec-
of thermal noise is given as , where
tively, compared to the back-to-back. This is one of the reasons
is the Boltzman constant, and
why the EVM degrades with fiber length as shown in Fig. 12.
dB is noise figure of the RF amplifier at the receiver, is the
room temperature in degree Kelvin, and is the load
resistance. APPENDIX C
Now, the total noise power will be given as [18]
Simulated magnitude and delay response of Chebyshev-II
filter is presented in Fig. 19 for third-, fifth-, and seventh-order
filters with different bandwidths. From Fig. 19(a), we see
All calculated receiver noise contributions are presented in Chebyshev-II filter has a flat magnitude response in the pass-
Fig. 17 for the back-to-back. It is shown that ASE-ASE beat band. Though, out of band ripples increase with filter order,
noise is negligible because of the low noise figure of the EDFA which is not of importance if the side-lobe suppression is higher
and narrow bandwidth of the optical filter used. The output from than the required 20 dB ACPR for WiMedia standard. Fig. 19(b)
the RF amplifier at the optical receiver in Fig. 2 is directly con- shows that the delay increases if the filter order is increased
nected to the data analyzer. The scope captures the signal in and decreases if the filter bandwidth is increased. Also, higher
time domain and performs FFT on it. It analyzes the data within order filters have high delay overshoot at the edges.
1.6 GHz bandwidth. The thermal noise within this bandwidth
is around , which is small compared to other noise
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Ke Wu (M’87–SM’92–F’01) is professor of elec-
Meer Nazmus Sakib received the Bachelor’s de- trical engineering, and Tier-I Canada Research Chair
gree in electrical engineering from the Bangladesh in RF and millimeter-wave engineering at the Ecole
University of Engineering & Technology, Dhaka, Polytechnique (University of Montreal). Dr. Wu was
Bangladesh and Master’s degree in electrical a visiting or guest Professor with many universities
and computer engineering from the Concordia around the world. He also holds an honorary visiting
University, Montreal, Canada, in 2006 and 2009, professorship and a Cheung Kong endowed chair
respectively. His research interests include OFDM professorship at the Southeast University, and an
radio over fiber systems, coherent optical OFDM honorary professorship at the Nanjing University of
systems, high speed optical receivers, quantum dot Science and Technology, China. He has been the Di-
semiconductors and high frequency RF systems for rector of the Poly-Grames Research Center. He has
optical communication. authored or co-authored over 450 referred papers, and also several books/book
chapters. His current research interests involve substrate integrated circuits,
antenna arrays, advanced CAD and modeling techniques, and development
of low-cost RF and millimeter-wave transceivers. He is also interested in the
modeling and design of microwave photonic circuits and systems.
Bouchaib Hraimel received the B.Ing. degree in
electrical engineering from École Hassania des
Travaux Publics, Casablanca, Morocco, in 1993 and
the M.Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the
École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Dongya Shen, photograph and biography not available at the time of
Canada, in 2002. He is currently working towards publication.
his Ph.D. degree. His current research interests
include design, simulation, and experiments of
radio-over-fiber communication systems.