Experimental evaluation of a radio-on-FSO communication system for multiple RF signal transmission

In this paper we present the design concept plus experimental results and evaluation of a newly developed advanced DWDM Radio-on-Free-Space Optical (RoFSO) communication system capable of simultaneous transmission of multiple RF signals. The RoFSO system is evaluated based on the performance metric parameters defined for the various RF signals comprising of different wireless services including terrestrial digital broadcasting signals, cellular 3GPP W-CDMA signals, IEEE 802.11 WLAN based signals etc being transmitted over the RoFSO link. The performance metric parameters being considered include standard optical received power, CNR and BER characteristics, W-CDMA signal transmission metric parameters like Adjacent Channel Leakage Ratio (ACLR) and Error Vector Magnitude (EVM), modulation error ratio (MER) for digital terrestrial television broadcasting signals as well as spectrum mask and EVM for IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN signal transmission.