Abstract
In this paper, we present a performance analysis of microwave signal
transmission by deploying digitized RF transport over a standard optical fiber
link. The bandpass sampling technique is used to digitize the RF signal. An
analytical model, which is transparent to any modulation format, was developed
to assess the transmission performance of a digitized RF signal in M-level
quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) format. Using this analytical model,
key design parameters such as bit resolution, link bit rate, receiver sensitivity,
and link signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) were analyzed for a digitized 2.475 GHz
RF signal with 16-QAM data modulation format and 6 MSymbols/s baud rate over
a 20-km optical link. The analytical results show that the link SNR is predominantly
determined by the performance of the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). We
experimentally demonstrated the digitized RF transmission over a 20-km optical
link. The analytical model and experimental results show that the performance
of the link SNR is governed by jitter noise beyond 7 bits
of resolution of the ADC. Using an ADC with 8-bit resolution, a 2.475 GHz
RF signal with 16-QAM 6 MSymbols/s data was successfully transmitted and recovered
with very good error vector magnitude of 1.77.
© 2009 IEEE
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