Fiber-optic millimeter-wave uplink system incorporating remotely fed 60-GHz-band optical pilot tone

This paper proposes a fiber-optic millimeter-wave (mm-wave) uplink system i ncorporating a 60-GHz-band photonic downconversion technique. With this con cept, neither a light source nor a mm-wave source is required at a base sta tion (BS) since the mm-wave modulated optical pilot tone is fed from a remo te central station (CS), In the BS, a high-speed mm-wave electroabsorption modulator and a subsequent optical bandpass filter are used for the photoni c downconversion of the received mm-wave signal, converting the 59.6-GHz mm -wave signal into a 2.6-GHz intermediate frequency (IF) signal. The convert ed signal is then transmitted through the uplink fiber system to the CS wit h no significant chromatic dispersion effect, We successfully demonstrated not only photonic downconversion, but also 50-km-long fiber-optic transmiss ion of the downconverted 2.6-GHz IF signal with 156 Mb/s of data.