A full‐duplex radio over fiber architecture employing 12 Gbps 16 × 16 optical multiple input multiple output for next‐generation communication networks.

Summary: In this article, a full‐duplex millimeter wave (mm‐wave) enabled radio‐over‐fiber architecture is proposed for distributed antenna systems. This architecture is capable of achieving transmission of 16 × 16 optical multiple input multiple output spatial streams at 12 Gbps per spatial stream by employing wavelength division multiplexing and exploiting its other degrees of freedom such as polarization states and modes of wavelengths. A single laser source based multiwavelength comb and wavelength reuse techniques along with plastic optical fiber are employed to make the proposed architecture cost efficient. Optical heterodyne detection is performed at the radio access unit to generate mm‐wave carrier frequency at 60 GHz. Channel equalization is achieved for pulse amplitude modulation data signal by employing least mean square equalizer to mitigate the optical fiber channel effects. Our proposed system supports 16 × 12 Gbps for downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) transmissions. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, we compare the receiver sensitivities at forward error correction limit of 3.8 × 10−3 of bit error ratio of back to back system, employing no fiber effects, with its counterparts. We show that acceptable power penalties for the fiber lengths of 200 and 400 m are achieved for both LP01 and LP11 modes in DL and UL directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]