Simple polarization-insensitive coherent RoF link with increased capacity

A simple polarization-insensitive coherent radio-over-fiber (RoF) link with increased spectrum efficiency and transmission capacity is proposed and demonstrated. Instead of using two polarization splitters (PBSs), two 90° hybrids, and four pairs of balanced photodetectors (PDs) in a conventional polarization-diversity coherent receiver (PDCR), a simplified PDCR with only one PBS, one optical coupler (OC), and two PDs is employed in the coherent RoF link. At the simplified receiver, a novel, to the best of our knowledge, digital signal processing (DSP) algorithm is proposed to achieve polarization-insensitive detection and demultiplexing of two spectrally overlapping microwave vector signals as well as the elimination of the joint phase noise originating from the transmitter and the local oscillator (LO) laser sources. An experiment is performed. The transmission and detection of two independent 16QAM microwave vector signals at identical microwave carrier frequencies of 3 GHz with a symbol rate of 0.5 GSym/s over a 25-km single-mode fiber (SMF) is demonstrated. Thanks to the spectrum superposition of the two microwave vector signals, the spectral efficiency as well as the data transmission capacity is increased.