Large-Capacity Photonics-Assisted Millimeter-Wave Wireless Communication Enabled by Dual-Polarized SISO Link and Advanced MIMO Equalizer

As the mobile communication evolves from sub-6 GHz to millimeter wave (MMW) frequency bands, the demand for high-speed wireless transmission rates exceeding hundreds of gigabits per second is becoming more and more prominent. It is one of the important cornerstones supporting numerous emerging bandwidth-consuming applications represented by the metaverse, digital twin and so on. So far, there is a huge room for improvement in wireless transmission rate, which is far inferior to the transmission capacity of fiber optic links. In this paper, we have proposed and experimentally demonstrated a large-capacity photonics-assisted MMW wireless communication system over 20-km fiber and 1.3-m wireless transmission at the W band. A dual-polarized single-input single-output (SISO) wireless link, instead of the commonly used 2 × 2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) links, is used for the transparent transmission of optical polarization division multiplexing signal, which significantly simplifies the system complexity and enhances its robustness. In addition, the transmission performance is further improved by employing an advanced MIMO Volterra nonlinear equalizer. With the bit error ratio threshold of 2 × 10⁻², a record single-lane single-carrier wireless air interface rate (WAIR/ch/λ) up to 504 Gb/s has been achieved for the first time. This solution we proposed provides opportunity for progress in the wireless air interface capacity close to the fiber-optic transmission capacity in the fiber-wireless integration transmission systems.