An 18-Tupled Photonic Millimeter-Wave Generation Using Cascaded Mach-Zehnder Modulators

This article presents an optical generation scheme of mm-wave carriers by 18-tupling of radio frequency (RF) signal using three cascaded Mach-Zehnder modulators. The proper selection of modulation index, biasing points and phase shifts leads to generation of desired ninth-order sidebands. A thorough mathematical analysis has been performed to validate the mm-wave generation and the results obtained are also consistent with simulation findings. Moreover, the effect of variation of key system parameters from their ideal values is also investigated. The higher tupling factor and elimination of optical filtering in the proposed scheme make it promising for implementation in radio-over-fiber (RoF) transmissions.